" C o n s u m e "
Transient
Illusive
Soft
Flowing
Loving
Dissolving
Trusting
Focusing
Praying
Allowing
Igniting
Embodying
Burning
Disintegrating
Abandoning
Surrendering
Revealed
Taken Over
Consumed
|
|
2003, 16mm black and white/color sound 10 minutes
Directed,
Filmed and Edited by Dominic Angerame.
Soundtrack: "Pomolusya" ("I
Will Pray", Ukranian Prayer) and "Gamaya" ("Lead Us", a
Sanscrit mantra) performed
by Zhanna, recorded and mastered by Zak
May @ BAZA studios. Excepts
from "Lyrical" and "Chaos" from the "Tribe" recording of Gabrielle
Roth and the Mirrors with permission from Raven
Recording.
"Inspired by the novel FLICKER
by Theodore Roszak, this film was intended to explore the images captured
in the flickering light of multiple projector beams. By utilizing superimpositions
within the camera, one could experience the pulsating light and explore hidden
imagery through use of the "Sally Rand" that Roszak refers to. However, once production
began...the projector beams began to put both myself and my actress into a trance
state due to the strobe light it presented...the resulting film turned into
a trance by natural evolution and in essence the film becomes even more... It becomes an exploration
into oneself and the sense of seeing and being at the same time...both an inward
journey and an outward one..."
Dominic Angerame |
 |
Reviews
"Angerame’s experiment with stroboscopic cinema, a kind of trance film inspired by Theodore Roszak’s novel Flicker, interweaves eroticism and orientalism anew in the ecstatic performance of a dancer before the camera. Dancer is exposed naked in the flickering light, percussive composition, and Angerame’s frenetic montage, which merges its protagonist (literally from top to bottom) into a vision that flows seamlessly from the concrete to the abstract and back into the concrete. This montage layers the ritualistic movement studies of the heroine’s body within each other so that they attain an artificial, graphic quality."
from an article by Stefan Grissemann
"Set mostly to a soundtrack of chant and percussion, Consume displays an idea of ritual, a concept of dance, and depicts the elusive power of the projected image."
from Flickhead review by Ray Young
This powerful, compelling film depicts a trance state from a radically subjective point of view. It is the only film I've ever seen which manages to convey so strongly what it feels like, from the inside, to enter into such a state."
from Film Threat review by David Finkelstein
“Dominic Angerame's CONSUME represents a successful example of using formal strategies. The black and white film focuses on the rhythmic movements of a female dancer. The image of the dance appears in layers, superimposed over itself, and has a soft, tactile quality. As the film progresses, the contrast in the image increases, until finally it transforms into abstract black and white shapes. The movement from legibility to abstraction and back again creates a visceral experience, one that is underscored by the percussion-based soundtrack. CONSUME captures the fickle nature of memory: concrete and clear, partial and blurred, intense and fleeting.”
Dina Ciraulo
"By way on an elegant invocation
of the merely probable meanings of lost histories and ethnic otherness as manifest
in the hand signalings of a dancing muse rippling towards us as if to kiss the
head of a king cobra, we're soon left floating and alone only to realize --
and here is the rub, that the king and not beauty is in the eye of the beholder,
and this, being you, the viewer, is about to be torn apart like the yearling
consorts of great antiquity.
A bloody good time is to
be had for all. After setting us up at the haunted banquet of all but lost meanings,
we're given just enough time to realize that we're the gypsies, the gypsies
of love lost and shredded contexts. And we're drawn out of the shadowy curtains
of the far east, out of Indonesia, through Sufiland and the Great Hungarian
Plain, past the Ukraine and into Africa again, thrown in some Cuba and Haitian
Voodoo, if you will, until you realize eventually that it is you who've become
the subject of this dissembling smorgasbord down the gullible and into the belly
of the beast we go, down, going down for the count of love…
Before you can scarcely
catch your breath, suddenly the feast and is bleeding and you're bloody it.
You're fully awake now and love's tearing you apart. Your body is becoming the
Serenghetti of appetite, in savageness, the ground of being itself alive, eating
itself numb into satiety, blindness, night. Just hang on. This too shall pass
out. Wake up and smell the coffin. Egypt can't be that far off. The bottom line.
The ground floor of the pyramid scheme. You can count on Isis in a crisis, brother.
She'll have you in stitches come the Spring. Limbs rise up laughing with the
disinterred perfumes of loss and renewal. But right now you'll have to chill
into something Tibetan. And remember to say tanka. Tankas for everything. And
Kaliuga to you too, yearling. And yes, I'm happy to have been of use. Bon appetit.
And I didn't really know, it нs true, that I could be a twelve course meal for
you. You all, I mean. No, I promise, nothing personal. I won't take any of this
personally. Let's keep it simple. Whatever it takes then, after all, to be restored
to this throne of blood and light."
Ronald F.
Sauer