This re-release is even more timely in 2024 than when it was first released in 2011. Mark R. Turner reads his 2006 poem, as the film carries you rapidly through a maze of images drawn both in pencil and digitally depicting the questions raised by the poem. What is real and what is artificial? Is what we are told really true? Are content makers putting Truth in our eyes and ears or just serving their self interests? Will future people be able to dig up light or sound to make sense of this era?
Text of the poem:
We regard as wisdom
Bright reflections, pixels,
Bites of sound repeated;
Arranging body and face
Choreographed in a timely place,
Makes powerful and great.
We, transfixed by images,
Chew on shiny, tasty, sexy fear,
While back of lamps
And microphones
The mutual wink spins realism on the world.
When reality shows
The mutuality’s cover blows;
Peek from lights and bites
Unwilling to embrace, defend, or care,
Scrambling to help themselves,
Hoist the misdirection waving.
Thus, block by block, they build,
Rise from dust to take the stars,
Disregarding tongues confused,
Make themselves,
Make their world,
Self-sufficient as the truth.
Stand back, observe their limits,
Lumens, decibels and staging;
Will the Godhead be attained,
Or these pass to archeology,
Diggers pull up light and sound?
Mark Robert Turner
Julian, CA
February 15, 2006
The Film Gallery Cafe project operates on the concept that art and film are seeds which become greater things in people’s lives as they enter into conversation about them.
