A Film by David Berry

The Vimeo above called Power was created in October 2023 by my cousin David Berry.

I sent an email to David asking if he wanted to offer any words to the 6 minute Power. Knowing David and his Eastern spirituality I doubt he will have any words to add. They are not necessary when you have images and music. He would say something like this.

David began working with a young filmmaker named George Lucas right out of his graduation from Cal Arts. They worked out of a studio in LA and many of Lucas’ employees had dogs. So David was one of George Lucas’s original technical film people who got an Oscar in Special Effects for his work on the 1985 Cocoon. Now, almost 40 years later he is creating works like Power.

Media as Medium rather than Message. As a medium, of course invisible as water is to fish. 

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A continuous chant of music from a cut in the music of David Kristian and his Mirror Manifolds album. David is using a particular excerpt from this music for Power. Used to great effect. It offers a continual background to continual explosion of images that confront us in strobe light speed through the film. There is no time to do anything with the images. They appear and then morph into something else. Somewhat like worms in the processionals of becoming butterflies. We can identify certain images in the strobe like flashing of images and shapes. Numbers. A baby’s face. I see certain things from other time lapse films of my cousin in Power. 

But images appear so quickly and are always changing into other images, there is no grounding that can be established by the viewer of Power. David offers no words of explanation about the film. Just register them briefly and go on.

Part of the Chalk Hill Winery / December 2023

It qualifies I think as that new form of media for the post, post psychedelic era with new psychedelic drugs just hitting the marketplace at the same time as new forms and uses of AI, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. I can see that pieces like Power becoming new “wallpaper” for various events. Something to be shown in IMAX Theaters. Or ultimately, perhaps the type of material that should be played in Las Vegas’ Sphere. 

The old form of two hour movies and some linear plot is not going to mix well with the coming of the above technologies. I think that forms like Power might offer something new for current audiences. Especially, Western audiences who always expect “a story to play out.” Western audiences can never allow something to just “play out.” A story has to be connected to it. Here, with Power, there is no story connected to the images. (Unless I hear back from my message to David about this).

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