Refraction (1972)

Synopsis

“In “Refraction,’ the camera is set so that the leaves of a large tree fill the frame. Green ordinary leaves which move in their baroque ways under the wind. In a sense it is shocking to put on film such ordinary things, things which could be so easy to dismiss. Yet this undemanding, pleasant image hides something. The image IS of what one hypnotically stares at in forgotten moments, amd from which one wakes, when shapes make themselves up in it. These furtive possibilities confront the delimiting, all-eyes-cinema. The intimate sensation is made to bear on the public circumstances of film, provoking new readings of the moving leaves. As the image presses its quiet offerings on the viewer, a subtle interaction occurs between changes of speed in the camera and wind as they, in different ways, accentuate or diminish the speed of the fluttering leaves."