2002 Great Lakes Independent Film Festival

Ablution

Category: Experimental  12min 30sec
Director: Eric Patrick

Ablution is a film ritual that observes dissociation. It is divided into three vignettes, each with its own distinct structure.  In “The Fleeting,” a man becomes dissociated with temporal reality, and his subjective experience becomes the fleeting images of days transpiring in seconds—an elusive narrative. “Incantation” is a shamanistic chant…  the dissociation becomes deconstruction.  It is a subjective metaphor of an internal state.

The final piece (“A Hundred Foot Day”) is a continuous sequence of a day transpiring back on the front porch where the film started. As a whole, the Ablution, or the cleansing, is a look into the magical, if not somewhat uncertain, places that each of us pass through at select times in our lives.  Metaphorically, the cinematic structures of the three vignettes leave trap doors and secret passageways throughout the film for individual interpretation. Ablution is a relic…  a veiled glimpse at an emotional state.

Principal Cast:
Eric Patrick  
Jennifer Baker  

Director: Eric Patrick
Eric Patrick was raised in Southeast Texas .  He played throughout the southern United States in a band before moving to Albuquerque , New Mexico to study Art and Film and work in a radio station at The University of New Mexico.  After completing his undergraduate, he moved to Los Angeles to attend California Institute of the Art’s MFA program in Experimental Animation.  His films have been screened extensively throughout Europe , Australia , Asia and the Americas .  He has worked extensively in the commercial industry as an animator, both in Los Angeles and New York City .  Currently, he is living in Austin Texas making films, teaching animation, and animating a children’s television show called “Blues Clues” for the Nickelodeon network.