Water Over Glass

In Water Over Glass, the tension of a mind adrift and in conflict with itself is captured and bookended visually by the vast mutability of sea and sky, where water and air surfaces suggest both static and the dissolution of the individual. A doppelganger, a crime scene and the tidal erasure of what might have taken place: discomfiting moments in a bright, almost psychedelic, arc. Assembled from 16mm, super 8, and digital video, stop motion collage and digital compositing animation, this short film works backwards from an original story by Jason Zumpano and its musical articulation – Vancouver outfit The Cyrillic Typewriter’s 2018 album of the same name – to suspend a visual form over a sonic narrative. The crew of four filmmakers Vancouverites Kellen Jackson, Zoe Kirk-Gushowaty, Amanda Thomson and New York-based Jimi Pantalon each working remotely in a kind of exquisite corpse collaboration, interpreted the story and accompanying music in discrete sections as individual artists, but the finished product, a concatenation of eight short films reveals a subtly unified vision, where the uneasy push-and-pull of consciousness and self-awareness are described through diverse motifs of mirroring, embodiment, surveillance, and alienation.