Halo
Video by Helen Smith
Dissolving into High-Summer.
Halo is based on a particular physical experience encountered by the filmmaker wherein the definition or boundary between the individual and the landscape disappears, one flowing into the other and back, leading to both a heightened sense of awareness and a sensation of completeness.
The mirror, in the film, expresses light outwards into the landscape from the actor; this is then reversed with the mirror acting as a ‘hole’ through his body, incorporating the landscape. His body becomes a frame, inverted into the landscape.
The lightening/mirror represents the halo itself and summons an ecstatic moment of Morse code-like emphatic communication. The red irises reflected in the mirror stand as if in flames.
Projecting a light-hearted, assertive, Demeterian presence and resembling the traditional male adventurer or discoverer, the man does not communicate anything that can be directly understood, he exists purely as a function of the landscape and a vessel for the ecstatic ‘charge’.