Watch Mouches Volantes

The second in Larry Gottheim's ELECTIVE AFFINITIES cycle, MOUCHES VOLANTES is, in the filmmaker's own words, "a celebration of elusive relationships" between sound and image, color and black-and-white, the moon and the waves, the aural testimony of Blind Willie Johnson's widow Angelina and the camera's illumination of a world simultaneously of and beyond the everyday. These lyrical fragments sweep in and out as with the tides; a time-based symmetry slowly emerges as the film reveals itself to be a perfect circle. Gottheim's beautiful shots of snow falling at night and waves crashing on the shore count among his purest evocations of the film image. - Max Goldberg