BACK TO
EVERYTHING
- a film by Meg Case and Brad Porter -“…a breathtakingly fast visual/verbal trip, a multi-faceted look at the ideas of replication, intimacy and borderlines which explodes across the screen in a proliferation of interconnected fragments” - David Finkelstein
Review
Circular Logic: Back to Everything
Lake Ivan Film Journal - David Finkelstein - Mar 27, 2023
“At two and a half minutes, Back to Everything, a new short by Meg Case and Brad Porter, jams a great many ideas and images into a very small amount of time, creating a breathtakingly fast visual/verbal trip, a multi-faceted look at the ideas of replication, intimacy and borderlines which explodes across the screen in a proliferation of interconnected fragments which are sure to occupy your mind for much longer than the video’s short duration.
The video uses found footage from a variety of sources, including a loopy early ad for the new invention of the office photocopier, an ad which deliberately mixes up the sexual allure of a secretary with her ability to make perfect copies. Back to Everything is in a double projection format, frequently swapping images from left to right, and features multiple visual riffs on the idea of copying: stereoscopic images, video feedback, images of cells splitting or of printing presses churning out copy. A man and woman are seen occasionally, their caresses and embraces somehow impersonal, as if we’re watching an ad which is selling the idea of human reproduction.” - read the full article here
Screengrabs
Text
Nuclear origin stories,
New beginning bodies and opening curtains introduce
Hard-edged and clear-cut definitions.
Names delineating
What is what, seen by whom.
And which whispered secrets get locked into
These bodies. These hands. These eyes.
Of course they call it a cage.
An animated prison meat suit,
Ill-fitted to the immaterial mind it transports.
Excess baggage, sold for cheap.
Then fold and cut, rip if you must.
The dissected pieces are worth more individually than together.
Oh, that black snake of Reason is relentless.
The manufactured outcomes are dead on arrival.
Movement is life.
Quantum particles are making choices.
“Behold the power of the individual,” they exclaim.
The individual mover, consumer, voter, worker, parent, child.
Yes, yes, the individual - let us create the lone particle.
Let us imagine, for just a moment,
That there are gaps made of nothingness which form
Border lines around every idea.
Then This can be This and
That can be That.
There’ll be hot and cold and water and air and fire and eggs
And me and you.
Some “me’s” will be mothers,
Some “me’s” won’t know where they come from.
But “you” can remind “me” when I forget the name-game we started playing.
When I lose myself so willingly into the dream,
Imagining that I am border-lined into this here body,
Or imagining that I am this here body,
Or that I am.
You can press into the tissue and close the gap,
Which was always nothingness,
Between the “me” and the “you.”
Thou art That, huh?
Then the nuclear family of origin is the total of everything.
And this looping life seems to suggest
That it will end where it began,
Back to everything.
Back to everything.