Movement House

29/08/2022

Austin indie rock band Darkbird dwell in a space of self-love, self-discovery, and inner reckoning on their single "3-2-Wake Up," a visceral, deeply introspective exploration of the self.

29/08/2022

Check out our new video, directed by Travis Lee Ratcliff and filmed by Brody Carmichael for Darkbird, an incredible gem of a band.

29/08/2022

19/08/2021

“Modern mass culture, aimed at the "consumer", the civilization of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.” ― Andrei Tarkovsky

16/07/2021

"When a man is born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.” ― Andrei Tarkovsky

15/07/2021

Discovering these slow motion close-ups of the marble hammering and filing was a real treat on location. One of the driving dynamics of the film was the tension between the seemingly violent process of sculpting and the aspiration within it to create something beautiful.

10/07/2021

One of the surprising joys of the trip was filming in the Natural History Museum of Ireland while it was closed to the public. The museum is like stepping backwards in time. It was established in the 1880s and has remained entirely intact since then. In many ways, it is a museum of a museum. Old victorian hunting trophies populate the walls in every direction. In Dublin it’s often known by its nickname: “the dead zoo.” We are alone here, with the sculptor, who for many years has come here and studied the anatomy of the animals when the museum is closed to the public.

08/07/2021

Over a few days we filmed Dony turning a lump of clay into a stunning likeness of a person. There were, however, moments in the early hours of our work with the sculpture yet unfinished where we would find ourselves filming an uncanny golem, a half made man. We found ourselves filming images both mysterious and frightening as the humanity of the sculpture revealed itself more clearly each hour.

07/07/2021

"History is not Time; nor is evolution. They are both consequences. Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul." -Andrei Tarkovsky

06/07/2021

"Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire." -Jorge Luis Borges

05/07/2021

“For many years I have been tormented by the certainty that the most extraordinary discoveries await us in the sphere of time. We know less about time than about anything else.” ― Andrei Tarkovsky

03/07/2021

On our last day of filming in Ireland we spent a few hours in the van traveling to an isolated beach. The beach was on private property and very secluded. Gale force winds were blowing in as a terrible storm headed directly our way. I remember walking the long path in the rain feeling literally knocked around by the piercing wind. The tides were rolling in as we began to film. It felt like we might only have minutes before either the storm or the tides trapped us on this tiny beach.

16/05/2021

Few spaces have felt so genuinely enchanted as this patch of forest in Sally Gap.

15/05/2021

Light after an autumn storm.

14/05/2021

I remember asking myself how many lives had come and gone in the time that these trees have stood here. This lonely patch of forest appeared out of the fog. We’d been driving through sparse hillsides for about an hour. Here was this thick collection of trees, ancient in their appearance, isolated like an island in the void. Fires destroyed many of these patches of forest the summer after we filmed there. It’s strange to think that this place might be gone now.

13/05/2021

“In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection.” ― Andrei Tarkovsky

12/05/2021

In 2018, we were commissioned to create a portrait of the sculptor Dony Mac Manus in Ireland. Over the next ten days we would explore his life, his work, and try to find the right story that communicated his experience. Dony has rejected much of contemporary art and works with methods and tools used throughout the renaissance. He works in marble and clay as well as painting. To me what was most fascinating about Dony were a set of questions he seemed to pose about our experience of time and our sense of place in it. How do we navigate the past, tradition, and form our identity in the present in response to these forces? These were the ideas we wanted to explore in this film.

11/05/2021

Around the time we finished filming at Glendalough we received word that we had special permission to film in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin for a few hours, but only if we could make it there that evening. We piled into the the car and drove through the winding roads as rain storms headed our way. Like typical Americans, driving on the left side of the road was a bit of a challenge and as the road narrowed the car took a hit against the ditch on roadside. A few minutes later and the tire was flat. We changed the tire in the mud and rain and made it just before nightfall at Saint Patrick’s, where we had the cathedral to ourselves.

10/05/2021

The ruins of Glendalough were surrounded by a graveyard. A tower stands tall at the center of the settlement, right out of a storybook. The sculptor told us he saw this place as the spiritual core of Ireland, the place where key parts of the Irish identity were really born.

09/05/2021

The settlement of Glendalough was built in the 6th century. I don’t think I fully appreciated the significance of the site while we were present there. It’s history and presence makes itself known across Irish history and literature. W.B. Yeats wrote about it in 1919 in Under the Round Tower. “In Glendalough beside the stream - Where the O'Byrnes and Byrnes are buried, - He stretched his bones and fell in a dream - Of sun and moon that a good hour - Bellowed and pranced in the round tower.” The unseasonably cold April revealed the meaning of the word gloaming to me. We only saw one sunset or sunrise the entire time we were in Ireland. Night would come gradually in the form of fog, mist, and a haunting dimming of light behind the veil of clouds.

08/05/2021

In the weeks after shooting I spent a lot of time staring at our footage and thinking about Robert Bresson. I’ve always loved his films but rarely revisit them. There is a coldness to so much of his work that only melts away after he’s lulled you into his rhythm. And then, quite surprisingly, you’re overcome by the turn his films make towards devastating bursts of emotion. Consistent across his films was the way he used the quiet details of our humanity to make visible the grandeur of his themes. His obsession with the human hand as a metaphor for the soul of a person has always stuck with me.

07/05/2021

In the mountains of Matagalpa we were surrounded by a jungle that was teeming with life on the grandest scale.
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I remember Howler Monkey’s distant calls as we drove across precarious mountain roads. Off the side of the mountain enormous trees stretched up into the hot and humid mists from afternoon rainstorms. Soil and air alike were alive with insect and animal. Here, the earth felt somehow wilder and younger, despite being well within the confines of Matagalpa’s homesteads and farms.

06/05/2021

“Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.” -Wendell Berry

05/05/2021

In the weeks around our filming Wendell Berry was constantly on my mind. Berry was one of the most articulate thinkers of his generation and had a way of putting into words the spectacular importance of our intrinsic connectivity to the land.
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In Berry’s writings I found a constant recognition that we do not only impact the land but that the land impacts us.
It is in his work I felt most keenly the sense that a very real and ongoing dialogue between our civilization and nature always exists and can never be forgotten. And that as a result of that dialogue, the way we treat the land often shapes the way we treat each other.
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In Berry’s view our relationship to farmers, our treatment of the land not only defines our culture, our potential for goodness or our failure to obtain it.

04/05/2021

Every coffee cherry is picked by hand. The workers move with unbelievable speed and dexterity, removing only ripe and healthy cherries from the coffee tree. A cherry only represents two harvestable coffee beans. In filming their work we came to understand the sheer amount of skill and attention that goes into each bean that is harvested. I haven’t looked at a bag of coffee beans the same way since our time in the fields. The farm we filmed treats their workers with respect and pays them fairly but the average price for a days labor in the coffee fields is only seven dollars. Many workers rise well before dawn and walk several hours to their farms from the communities around Matagalpa.

03/05/2021

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.” - Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

02/05/2021

It is this same impulse that poses the riddle at the core of our global economy. How can we build a more just world when we cannot see the needs of others?

01/05/2021

The desire to build walls, close doors, to hide our grief or our joy, is an effort at illusion-making that ultimately only prevents us from realizing the depths of our capacity for empathy. In so much of our society we’ve shut ourselves off from our neighbors and willed ourselves into blindness to their needs.

30/04/2021

Across the countryside of Nicaragua we saw the messiness and beauty of life play out in overwhelming detail. It had the inevitable consequence of reminding you the degree to which we are all entangled in each-other’s lives.

29/04/2021

I remember the hours we drove from Managua to Matagalpa. As we passed through small towns, we were surprised by the scenes of life that unfolded outside our car window. Every home had open doors. And the public square seemed to be all around us. Each second of the drive became marked by intimate glimpses into the drama and comedy of the lives we witnessed.