CHRISTINE MARIE
Filmed and edited by Christine Marie.
4TRAINS. Working behind the screen and on-stage, Christine Marie and her ensemble construct a live experimental film from shadows (sans computers or projectors). Reminiscent of silent-era cinema and enhanced by hand-built stereoscopic 3D technologies. 4TRAINS is poetic, visual storytelling exploring 19th-century American industrialization through the eyes of a young couple. This wordless fable reveals a nation forging full-steam into an unknowable future, one in which notions of time and toil are changing, and rail lines fuel an expansive transformation of the collective imagination. The expressionist story, while set in the past, explores the modern relevance of living with dignity in a rapidly changing world in which one feels little control over external events. Conceived, directed and designed by Christine Marie.
An earlier version with an alternate title Signaling Arcana. Video filmed and edited by Christine Marie.
[Christine Marie] is an inventor of analog that intentionally uses the dispersion of shadow to speak silent poems. She makes color that the fortuitous eye absorbs into the body as emotion. She has the audacity to disrupt light, and to weave a timelessness into its shaped absence, to wordlessly make a story of ambition and migration out of negative space."
Yerba Buena Center For the Arts program notes.
4TRAINS aims to connect us to a rare generation like mine, one in which a single technological development comes into being after our birth and changes our very experience of time and everything it touches. I am among the last generation to know what life was like before microcomputers, smartphones and PCs. I created 4TRAINS the year I returned San Francisco after graduate school and was told that the entire city block containing our 10,000 square-foot collective arts warehouse had been sold to Google. It is my response to profound devastation and heartbreak.