Love-Life

Short Synopsis

Love-Life is a short 16mm experimental docu-drama, a poem, a love song; an image journey to elucidate faith, hope, and connectedness.

Description/Treatment

Love-Life is a short film that crosses borders among the genres of narrative, documentary, and experimental.  This film is a poem, a love song; an image journey to elucidate faith, hope, and connectedness.  The characters in the film are the filmmakers.  The Young Woman, RoseMary Sindt, is the director, producer, and poet laureate of the film, adventuring to recreate the images of her poems, the emotions of her life.  The Young Man, Chris Thomas, is the cinematographer, processer, editor, and image voyageur; he is an experimental rule breaker looking to see how saturated and gorgeous every image can look.  This story, Love-Life, is a tale of the quest for the sacred and spiritual that is available in the everyday; beauty waiting to be recognized, captured, and kept. This film appears in broad strokes of watercolor. It is ethereal. This really happened, it is happening, it is always happening.
The filmmakers are attempting to give chase to the cinematic magic that exists within their world, the light, landscape, and movement of the natural, ephemeral, ever changing, living, growing, and dying.  With their moviemaker eyes wide open, the two filmmakers met by chance, in an airport, waiting for flights from North Carolina, back to separate Midwest destinations. One was flying from home, one towards theirs. For the next two years, they grew to know and care about one another through written word; they fell in love. Exchanging impressions about their everyday triumphs and challenges, their letters were fruitful with images.  They did their best to read, look and listen to them, they were being told to spread the message; “There's something for everyone to believe in.”  Now it's time to develop the film their eyes and minds have seen.  The filmmakers are disciples of impending splendor in all events, in every landscape.  They are believers in the appearance of the sublime within reality, they aim to teach a new way of seeing, feeling, loving, to make manifest through images the true love-life that exists within life.
Love-Life will be captured on 16mm reversal and negative film stocks.  Much of the experimental and documentary footage will be captured with the Krasnagorsk-3.  Most of the footage will be hand processed; some of the narrative scenes will be processed professionally and shot on the Arri-SR 2.  The filmmakers are seeking out new colors, textures, and luminance from each frame.  Cross-processing and optical printing will be utilized to bleed opulence and wonderment into every moment.  The film will be rich in color, thick and variable in texture.  This is an experiment to build dreamlike mirages, to create something emotionally moving and memorably fantastical.
Narrative scenes provide transport for the experimental elements of this film; they are the venue to demonstrate the existence of cinematic magic within real life.  Scenes flow seamlessly from realism to surrealism; the imagination and hope of the characters draw images that evoke peace in otherwise oppressing and solitary settings.  The Young Woman takes a lone winter bike ride home from the hospital, where she sat alone with her ailing mother.  Upon arriving home she runs a bath.  Lying like Ophelia at the bottom of the tub, she opens her eyes to see a projection of images on the bathroom ceiling; blue sky, braids, ropes, hands reaching, the Young Man’s voice comes in, he speaks of the necessity to hold on to the images of the mind, the necessity to hope and to dream. The bathroom becomes dark and begins to fill with the blinking glow of fireflies.  Glitter blinking; the fireflies take over the room, turning it to an open field at night.  She is living, dreaming, awaking.
In another setting, the Young Man Rides the train into downtown Chicago, he is overwhelmed with the commotion and bustle of the city, isolated he peers from the window of the train, observing the city.  The voice of the Young Woman comes in, in poetic verse she relates her own feelings of isolation, “It was only months ago when I could close my eyes to find only darkness- coming in like a thick blanket of sleet over the little yellow house on dollar island, pounded by the prairie winds, stuck fast, mummified until springtime.”  A chaotic city montage begins. The Young Man says, “I can never hear the birds in Chicago.”  The montage of orderly city chaos continues.  A flock of seagulls take flight, filling the frame as the city commotion crescendos with their echoing mechanical squawks.  The chaos is bluntly silenced by the view of Lake Michigan, the blue expansiveness bearing visual and sonic catharsis.  Again comes the voice of the Young Woman, “I can stand in my kitchen and see lake Michigan from your eyes. Strongly willing the future to be as endless as the icy ocean that you're dreaming onto.”  Even through the separation and solitude of the characters, they remain together; they are guiding one another, to dare to hope. “There is a place where you and I are together, here we have always been together, and here we continue.” (The Delicacy and Strength of Lace, Leslie Marmon Silko)
Other narrative scenes serve as poetic stand-ins; the scenes are metaphors and symbolism.  An Airstream camper sits shrouded in the darkness of a vast empty machine shed, sparks of a welding rod sprinkle light over the room, the Young Woman diligently welds away, making a repair to the roof of the camper.  The camper is a metaphor for the wounded heart, stuck stagnant, in need of repair.  One morning the Young Man awakes; his warehouse bedroom is filled with an ethereal orange-red-golden light, the faint sound of birds singing is heard.  He moves at a stop motion pace, appearing like stained glass, the sound of the singing grows, the Young Woman’s voice says, “There is no fear in today. Each moment, an orange-blue-splash-flicker-click-fire sunrise- the morning scratching at my eyelids- the wind chases me back to my most familiar places- I close my eyes again and- I am home.”  His image is overtaken by the glorious staining light, the sound of the birdsong fills the room; spring has arrived.  It is morning in an expanding junkyard; the Young Woman awakes on a bed amidst heaping piles of junk.  The junkyard is a symbol for the feeling of waking to consumerism, over use, wasteful society.  The Young Woman retrieves a suitcase from the trunk of a junked car and exists the waste mounds, not looking back.
It is time for the two to unite.  The Young Man waits at a nearly vacant airport baggage claim.  As the young woman appears on the escalator, we see the Airstream camper, set in an open prairie, amidst a field of gilded yellow sunflowers, the camper gleams silver and new in the sunlight, the blue sky clear and open to the horizon.  The door of the camper begins to rattle.  The Young Woman reaches the bottom of the escalator, in a single step the couple embraces, the Young Man says, “I fell in love with you.” They kiss.  The door of the Airstream ceases, the Young Woman says, “I fell in love with you.”  The camper door opens releasing hundreds of bright yellow balloons into the blue sky, the balloons disappear, up, up, up and away!
The narrative story of Love-Life continues in its development, this portion of the tale functions as a building block for the larger experimental docudrama.  All the images, the filmmakers will have seen, felt and tasted.  These pictures will be developed and served out of appreciation for their occurrence. Love-Life cannot fully be written because it exists within the happening world, and also within the written word. The filmmakers must work with what has happened to them and what they experience up to each present moment. This film will need to be lived out, sought, found, and it will be caught, captured, kept.  The question of destiny and the struggle to hope remain.  Chris and RoseMary continue on their quest to breathe new image spirits into the everyday. They search for love-life, using light to reveal, stories to relate, metaphors and symbolism to evoke poetry from each moving image. Excitedly Love-Life exclaims, “Look at this!!! Look at how staggeringly extraordinary all of our lives are! We are ALIVE and seeing this! This is a beautiful sight. This is a joyful existence!"