GRAVITY WAS EVERYWHERE BACK THEN is the ballad of Leonard Wood, who built his house as a healing device to cure his wife. Filmmaker Brent Green has created many animated shorts but for his first feature-length film he built a full scale replica of Wood's house in the yard behind his family's barn, using live action and hand-drawn stop motion animation to tell the true story of a man trying to invoke his own homemade miracle. The original seventy-five minute film was shot on a consumer-grade Nikon digital still camera. In Green's low-fi rendering even the depiction of a car crash, with Leonard flying between two windshields, seems both quotidian and utterly beautiful at once. Sisyphean though it may seem, GRAVITY's story is rooted in the fantastically normal precarity of going for broke. For this sixty-six minute live performance, Green narrates the film with the same urgency and wry insights that drive his subject, crafting a folk essay that weaves Leonard's story of love and loss in with his own. - Dena Beard
