The Book Says

The music video “The Book Says” is a contemplation of redemption and judgment incorporating parts of Soul Coughing’s song “$300” and Johnny Cash’s haunting song “God’s Gonna Cut You Down”. In the contrasting of images and themes, I hoped to suggest a leap of faith, a movement: from disbelief to faith, from confusion to clarity, from abstraction to narrative. I produced this video in Final Cut Pro, but used many of the layering sensibilities employed by Resolume. For this project, I was strongly influenced by Neil Postman.

His writings in Technopoly continually return to the concept of a lens or a filter as the source of meaning and direction in the world. In acknowledging the focusing aspects of any lens, I also wanted to question the limiting behavior of any lens, structure, or dogma. I produced this video in Spring of 2007 for the University of Denver's Digital Cinema, Theory and Practice class taught by Trace Reddell. Some images were taken from archival footage on internetarchive.org and from NASA's video collection. The title, "The Book Says," comes from the film Magnolia.