Jennifer Reeves' Celluloid Canvas

Who says films need dialogue? Or characters? Or scenes? Jennifer Reeves says otherwise, and her short experimental works - LIGHT WORK MOOD DISORDER and HE WALKED AWAY - flout these conventions and strive to capture a more essential and more pure, yet more raw, more spontaneous reaction from those who experience them.

"The audience is the main character, experiencing the world,"said Reeves. "The drama happens within the viewer."

A projector starts up, rolls over, followed by a second projector, adjacent. Two separate streams of images pour outward, and the 18-minute, dualscreen film titled LIGHT WORK MOOD DISORDER has begun.

Your first reaction is curiosity. A swirl of colorful abstract shapes blends and blurs to reveal stock footage of laboratory "how-to"videos. Then there is confusion. A droning, prolonged, humming sound accompanies the images. Then there is wonder. Then tension. Delight. Mesmerization. Stupor. Relief. Joy. Acceptance.

Based out of New York, 36-year-old Reeves has had her works screened for film festivals in Toronto, for Sundance, Rotterdam and others. Both films selected for AFI FEST rely on bright vivid patterns, heavy-post production and retouched film stock. To create LIGHT WORK MOOD DISORDER, Reeves actually painted on and sewed into the film.

"I searched through piles of trashed and deteriorating 16mm educational films,"said Reeves, "looking for shots that would develop themes of creativity, science, invention and destruction, illness of the neglected physical self. I altered that footage with various direct-on-film techniques, and then I optically printed it." If using two projectors sounds ambitious, it's actually a modest reduction.

"LIGHT WORK MOOD DISORDER came out of an invitation by Barry Esson, the director of the Dundee Contemporary Arts Festival, who had heard of my earlier work (HE WALKED AWAY) and asked if I could do a similar project for their festival,"said Reeves. "I'd been wanting to further develop my work in multiple-projection montage, and I wanted to do some new experiments with chemicals, film, sharp objects and light and explore some new, different themes. The end result was a four-projector film, which was pretty great, but it was too much really. I scaled it back to two."

HE WALKED AWAY, the slightly more narrative of the two, came first and uses actual footage shot by Reeves. To her, its creation was a break from normality.

"I wrote, produced, directed, shot, edited and did the sound design for my feature film, The Time We Killed [2004]," said Reeves, "and I needed a breather. I needed perspective, and I wanted to feel a lightness of creativity without the pressure."

A creative experiment, sure. But something more.

"I envied how spontaneously and how quickly music can be made, and I wished film could be like that,"said Reeves. "What luxury! What a dream! So when my musician friend Skœli Sverrisson asked me if I could put together a film for a live music show in New York, I jumped at the chance. We did it very quickly and that unnamed piece eventually grew into HE WALKED AWAY.

A unique experience each time.

"I've performed different versions of the films with different composers over the last couple years,"said Reeves. "That it is a double-projection work allows for a kind of composing that is not fixed like a regular film. It could play a little differently each time, in the same way music is never performed exactly the same every time."