Plages

This is a film about a collective state of mind called the Copacabana. The film is an amazing long-take shot from a hotel room in Rio de Janeiro that overlooks the Copacabana and accompanied by a patchwork sound track of voices, music, and exploding fireworks. In describing this work, one finds oneself falling into director's own elliptical manner of recitation, such is the power of its mood. We see the beach at night, with people dressed in white on the sand. "It's the biggest drawing!", an art collector keeps on saying. Explosions from the fireworks get more and more volcanic, turning the screen into Turner-like cascades of colorfire and smoke produce imagery verging on abstraction. Copacabana has no center. It is an oasis, a utopia exists only in the trance of image.