Paula J. Sanders
It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.---Andy Warhol
It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.---Andy Warhol
Let’s be artistically and brutally honest; anyone in 2013
can make a movie. Just point and click your way through YouTube…the all-access
to technology truth is out there and people are actually impressed. (According
to the number of views received anyway). I am simply not convinced that
every moving picture out there is actually “art”.
Friday night, I received an opportunity to have a private
viewing of Benjamin Ward’s film The Soul
Gatherer written by the extremely versatile actor, director, producer
Mark-Brian Sonna (http://www.mbsproductions.net/)
. Unlike most of the copycat, “look I have too much throw away cash and time on
my hands independent movie”, this was actually a film; a really interesting
film. An intriguing film as well. A thinking film.
Religious scholars, psychoanalysts and sociologist could
spend hours disseminating the symbolism, metaphor and human condition and
reason behind the haunting lens of this film and never come to a defining
conclusion of its possible full meaning. That is what makes this such an
captivating effort.
T his film was rendered from a dream, birthed on the theater
floor and finally brought to a passionate climax on screen, the viewer is
immediately set a drift into a dark and rainy night of flooding emotion,
regret, remorse and the innate human desire to have back what has been lost.
Watching this film takes patience and a touch of voyeurism. We want to see the inside
of other peoples pain but we don’t want them to know that we are actually
enjoying it manifest itself into purposeful destruction right before our eyes.
One by one each person trapped inside of the lack luster walls, seemingly safe,
from the torrential rain, faces down their own personal pain revealing itself
as Gideon, which means “destroyer” in Hebrew. Yet, as the story unfolds, it
becomes more of a destructive anti-savior of all fatefully involved.
Aesthetically, The
Soul Gatherer is filmed in black and white, which hails back to the days of
film as art followed by the commitment to entertain. The sound f/x, the
perfected silence between dialog and music cues, provides an uneasy, yet
subtle tension, scene by scene, which is what makes the story move effectively
forward. It draws you in. You have to know.
Finally, the message, well just as in the film itself, you will have to find
your own meaning, remember, this is a thinking film. This is subjective art,
not spoon fed commercialize story telling. You will either get it or you won’t’
but it will get you.
