REVENANT
current video installation project
2004

In the spring of 2003, at the onset of the “war” “with” Iraq, I drove from New York City to San Francisco. Along the way, I shot a regular 8 film by holding a Bolex in one hand and steering with the other. Two weeks later, I crossed back again and ran the same film though the camera in the same order, double exposing it. I shot the film blind, without looking through the viewfinder. My decisions to release the shutter were based entirely on my feelings and stochastic sense of timing. Durations of shots were random, and exposures and focus approximate because my first priority was to not crash my truck. In essence, I knew nothing about what I was doing except that the rolling of the film coincided with the rolling of the road.

I also knew the basic story...that the Appalachians would lead to the Prairies, and then I would cross the Mississippi. And that sometime after that the Prairie would give way to the Great Plains in a whiff , and eventually, the Rockies would start to line the horizon, becoming larger and larger until I entered them. On the otherside were the bluffs that opened up to the Great Basin with miles of red rocks and then up to a barren desert of one spiney ridge after another with thirty mile gulps of a straight shot between until I came to the precipitous push of the Sierras that spill down to the Central Valley, a final spasm of hills and then the lands end.

Driving across the country held me in a suspended state of trance, anchored to a moving line that passed through me continuously. Through transition after transition, gargantuan to a whisper and back again, I could feel in an instant the entire country inside me because I was in the middle of it. I was floating within the zone of liminality: nowhere and everywhere at the same time, and the expanse of space collapsed into a single breath. Oblivious to borders, shedding all scores of constant restless migrations and its insuing litter, the land became an enormous anonymous force, an ancient aching specter that rose up to meet me.

The thing I find addicting about road trips is that they empty me out. I return to certain roads again and again because of how they make me feel. After a while I memorize them and commit them to my being in the way that some people memorize poetry or music. I know certain progressions, and keep certain roads as secrets. I also see their tangle as a drawing, one that I am continually working on in a reach for refinement and reticulation, in the way that someone is well read and articulate.

I made this film on an impulse. I knew that I wanted to fold the country over onto itself, and to grasp its vastness. I also knew that relying on chance as I made this overlay increased the likelihood of an abstraction that would empty the film of any specificity and mirror my feelings of weightlessness. Each frame would contain a span of 3000 miles that I myself had traveled and would distill it into a single, open moment. What I hoped to release through this penumbra was an apparition of that ancient aching spector, that tinge of a voice that cried.

©Sono Osato

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