Strange Attractors: Commun

(2023)

In a collage of images, tinted a dreamy blue, dust motes dance in a shaft of light. The sun rises over flowing water. A woman sleeps, shifting restlessly with her dreams. The earth literally breathes, rising up and down with the sound of the sleeper’s breath. The world seems suspended in the pre-conscious, waiting. This is the visual world of Commun, a poetic 8 minute short by Jonathan Rochier.

The sleeper opens her eyes. We see a collection of pins on the ground, which suddenly cling together in shifting clumps, animated by invisible magnetic forces. We hear the sound of boisterous crowds, even as individual pins are joining together and rising from the ground, forming crowds of their own.

In an image that manages to be both sexual and ecclesiastical at once, a tall prismatic quartz crystal looms over the pins, a drop of golden paint flowing from its glowing tip. Ethereal strands of gold rise heavenward over the pins, to the incantatory music of Tristan Leyri, sung by Axelle Perrier in a pure soprano. As the pins rise up, they become spontaneous paintbrushes, leaving delicate gold tracery as they move through the paint, guided by the magnetic flow.

The evocative, poetic imagery of Commun, with its condensed form, suggests many ideas: the human and divine forces that bind people together, the creation of art as a kind of residue of the effects of unseen energies which guide the hands of artists. In the manner of the imagist poets, Rochier uses images to suggest a range of ideas and emotions which can be interpreted by each viewer in a personal way, yet inspire a feeling of expansive joy and awe. As the pins dance to life in the golden light, so do we feel our eyeballs and our spirits becoming enlightened and enlivened.

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