Lachrymae

Lachrymae
Lachrymae

2000, 16 mm, colour, silent, 3 min.

Like some of his other films, Brian Frye's 'Lachrymae' has the look of an edited-in-camera home movie. Set in a cemetery, its images reveal tiny points of light flickering on and off. These are fireflies, and in the central sequence, a woman manages to capture a firefly and its light in her hands. As do many of Frye's other films, 'Lachrymae' offers itself in part as a metaphor for cinema, the firefly lights offering an even more fragile version of projector light's passage through those fragile, and ultimately impermanent, strips of plastic we call celluloid. The film's recognition of its own transient nature, together with its recognition of the impermanence of human life (the cemetery setting) and animal light, give it a rare, refined, memento mori - like eloquence.