Meditative

My favorite of this week's movie was Viola's "The Reflecting Pool" because of its visual trickery in the way it split the screen and the way that it paced itself so deliberately slow. It seemed to be saying something about the disconnect of being in the moment and the inevitable, cyclical passage of time. How do we bring those ideas together? What does it mean to be stuck in time as it continues to move around you? Do we get lost, just as the mysterious figure disappears? There was something distinctively Eastern/Asian/Buddhist in Viola's films, and I thought it gave them a forcefully meditative tone. In a course where we have seen so many filmmakers self-reflecting, it seemed interesting to see Viola using a reflecting pool. My only complaint was that the grainy low-quality video seemed to lack the artistic quality or endeavor of previous films.