Hyacinth Fire1989

AIDS is a marker for the gay community, it has changed us forever. It is now difficult to remember a time before. When I created this film it was a time of great confusion, my boyfriend had died two years previous and I was not dealing with my own precarious position. This film is a response to those days of confusion, fear, and acceptance.

Time is dissolved; history is once again our mirror. The past is our future. The continuous stutter of remaking ourselves. To be born again and yet again renewed and destroyed. All timelines are frozen, crystallized into reflective images. This is the nature of the film Hyacinth Fire. Images are compressed and isolated. They pass very slowly and create their own world void of time and place. It is an inner world of mystery, longing, confusion, and fear. The images reoccur, dissolve and are superimposed with slight variations. Together with the sound composition and text I’ve attempted to create an atmosphere where the viewer has time to explore the images, make connections within themselves and question their own feelings.

There are phobic visions and a multiplicity of meanings in Duncan’s poetry that transforms into new metaphors when viewed in the context of gay male consciousness during this time of AIDS. The title refers to the Greek myth of Hyacinthus who was Apollo’s mortal male lover whom he accidentally killed and from the blood of Hyacinthus the hyacinth grows. This myth is an apt metaphor for the AIDS crisis and its effect on gay men.

Witnesses point how we in our passion, fast as foxes,

Caught and devourd and scatterd the flesh

Of our common body; accuse us of cruelties in nature

And blood. And now it is winter.

I, too, remember how fiercely, relentlessly,

Drive we the blind split between us. I rise

In the night and hunt in the streets

That are emptied, suddenly vast

And filled with the dreary remain

Of past obsessions. – From Witnesses by Robert Duncan

Featuring: Steven Griffith and Carl Johengen

Original score by Douglas Cohen

Performed by Buffalo New Music Ensemble

Piano: Michael McCandless

Oboe/English Horn: Paul Schlossman

Percussion: Robert Schulz

Narration: Rodney Sharman

Text from poems by Robert Duncan