IMOW - Excerpt from “Presence of Water”

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Excerpt from “Presence of Water”
Rian Brown

United States

GALLERY

CONVERSATION

Media Center

When I got pregnant, I was very young, and had just finished film school. I thought that in becoming a mother, I might never be able to make films again, and so my husband and I decided to clean the slate, and start a new life. We moved to Italy, where he is from. I was seven months pregnant and had never met his family. My life and everything I had imagined about myself was in total flux; everything was new and foreign. It was scary, exhilarating and profound. It was in this estrogen induced dream and madness that the film was conceived. Most of the material for Presence of Water was shot when I was pregnant, living in a small town in Northern Italy and during the year following the birth of my son. The material was generated out of a great loneliness, isolation, fear and amazement. At that time, I was a stranger in a strange land -and a stranger to my own body during the gestation. Shooting rolls of film during that time was a way of staying connected to my former self, my dreams and my own memories. I never intended to make a film from these images. It was only two years later when I spent time looking at roll after roll that I realized that this was a story that I had to tell; the story of becoming a mother, shot, edited and created from the point of view of the mother and filmmaker, herself. Formally, the film is an autobiographical box or collection of moments, people, fragments both deliberate and accidental- using my own found footage and then shooting conscious scenes. The film is suspended in the metaphor of water. Water represents so many things to me -the amniotic fluid, the ocean between America and Italy, and the river of unknown that my partner and I had just “jumped into.” These are the ideas that helped inform the making of the film. “Presence of Water” is also about change. The body was the location of that change, but the internal landscape of the mind was also of great significance. In some ways it is a response to Stan Brakhage’s famous birth film “Window Water Baby Moving” from 1962. His breathtaking film of the birth of their first child, is both visceral and transcendental, but shot entirely from the point of view of the father, looking and capturing the experience. I was interested in investigating a woman’s experience of pregnancy. In this case, Presence of Water is a depiction of an internal landscape -taken from the perspective of the woman on the threshold of becoming two people; a threshold of a death of self, a birth of a new self and an actual birth of a child. I would like for people to think about the way in which we as human beings all go through deep transformations like birth, death, and loss of innocence and that these thresholds that we cross through can be moments of inspiration and profound growth. I would like to invite women to not be afraid of the alienating, ugly and scary side of pregnancy, because it is only by going into the darkness, the unknown that we can ultimately find ourselves and the beauty and power that being a mother is truly about. At the time that I made “Presence of Water,” I thought that becoming pregnant was going to prevent me from ever becoming a filmmaker. Instead, the experience of birth created a film that in turn launched my filmmaking career.

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Pregnancy
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katie l hebert
United States

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i'm pregnant with twins girls and i'm due december 25 07

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