Sewn

"Sewn" is about the moment when a relationship must transform or end. Though the actors portray this moment with emotional realism, the film's settings are symbolic and the narrative becomes fragmented by the tricks that anxiety and vulnerability can play on perception. This film is a spiritual sequel to my earlier rite-of-passage films, "Rise" and "Risk," in which my solitary characters struggled with a decision about whether to embark on a journey away from the symbolic spaces in which they had trapped themselves, alone. In "Sewn," a journey of two people is already well underway—but their quest is in jeopardy.. . All three of these films fit into a lineage that originated with Jean Cocteau's surrealist work in 1930 and continued in the '40s and '50s with a group of American avant-garde narrative filmmakers: Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, James Broughton, Curtis Harrington, Gregory Markopoulos. The critic P. Adams Sitney called their psychodramas “trance films.” They have a deeper ancestry in the dream plays of August Strindberg, which directly inspired the films of Ingmar Bergman. Bergman, along with David Lynch, taught me how detailed acting can serve as a compass for guiding a viewer through the world of a character's dream.. . I built this film through a method of image association that goes back even further, to the Symbolist poets. A quotation from Kandinsky inspired the opening image from which "Sewn" grew: "Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, wood, trees, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering in a puddle in the street. Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks." Though there is no spoken dialogue in "Sewn," all of its objects, landscapes, and interior spaces ask to be listened to.