The Communists Are Comfortable and 3 Other Stories1988

I am trying to articulate, through the use of landscape and monologue, a sense of human "fatality," a sense of the inevitable failure of idealism; inevitable because its fate is in people, and their foibles. The films' imagery is drawn from personal memory, urban housing project landscapes, social history, dreams, HUAC testimony, apartment interiors, a "woods." The "Other Stories" (the monologues) are formed out of the male-gender rhetoric of success and defeat, of dealing and "getting-by." "The sadness of lost ideals and forgotten hope ... through a stream of images and sounds that relate to one another in allusive, ambiguous, even mysterious ways. Its power lies in its resonant visual design, its subtle moods, and the precision of its gentle, almost musical passage across the screen." – David Sterritt