Emptiness Can Hold Things

Directed by Rachel Strickland

Places—like stories, but different—are structures of communication and collective memory. A place is an organization, and memory is often an articulation of space. Something about space escapes our attempts to look at it from above. At intervals and thresholds of an urban landscape, EMPTINESS CAN HOLD THINGS improvises on techniques of polylinear perspective long practiced in Japanese painting and landscape design, in order to explore experiential principles inherent in the definitions of place. Merging architectural space with cinematic construction, this experiment pursues a cinematic language for the genius loci, captured in manifold perspectives and composed with reference to a mobile viewpoint that is propelled by feet.