MAE Makes a Vampire Flick!

Link to view "RETURN" --http://youtu.be/lRv0u3sfsy8

Ok, we didn't set out to make a vampire film. It's just that some images in our latest video effort, RETURN, seem to echo images in the silent classic film "Nosferatu" by F.W. Murnau, 1922.

http://www.google.com/search?q=images+for+nosferatu&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS325&prmd=ivns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=R-IMTunnMKK30AH1u_yrDg&ved=0CCEQsAQ&biw=815&bih=385 [Notice in particular the elongated fingers of the vampire and the gothic, box-like doorways and coffins that often surround his image.]

The art center, which houses the studio where MAE usually films, was designed by the eminent architect Charles W. Moore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Willard_Moore Moore was the winner of the AIA Gold Medal in 1994, an honor he shares with such icons as Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller.

Moore believed that architecture must elicit responses from all the senses, not just the visual. He therefore created buildings and spaces that engaged history, myth and creativity. His work generates environments that stimulate the user. In much the same way, MAE creates films that aim to engage the viewer interactively by stimulating his or her senses of memory and imagination, the psyche, dream fragments, along with all the accompanying emotions.

The art center complex of buildings-- and especially the Studio itself, with its high windows and incredible light-- holds an invisible but palpable magic. Its magic seems to be about the freedom to explore the border spaces between the mundane world, and other dimensions... those of timelessness, imagination, and the creative force which Art reveals when circumstances favorably conjoin.

I have long found the many nooks and niches, cubby holes and crannies of the building's architecture intriguing. What kinds of movement and expression might be possible from within those spaces? And what might film reveal about them?

Even though some of the spaces we wanted to use on the day of filming were not easily accessible from ground level, Yulia took to them like the seasoned rock climber she is. Her improvisational movements within those spaces, although she was greatly cramped, restricted, and confined, are amazingly creative and evocative. Her movements allowed the film's final result-- the scary jerkiness of some scenes in the film, Nosferatu, and the dark, expressionist images of many early, classic horror films.

 MAE's films beg human interaction. They are an invitation for the Viewer to participate with the world conjured by the film. The Viewer can pull that world inside of him or herself and allow it to stimulate-- "call upon" if you will-- what ever is waiting in his/her inner landscapes of memory, dreams, emotions, and response.

If you watch RETURN, we hope you participate. We hope those of your  parts that are cramped will be freed to find grander spaces.