“A wild, immersive, adventurous, highly physical series of optical illusions. A very Muse creation!” —Lynne Sachs, 2024

Shape Games is a film about play, abstraction, and enchantment. A series of strange and seemingly pointless activities unfold. Line drawings morph and shuffle; bottles of water are inverted and spilled, small rocks scrape across the ground; larger ones tumble across a rain drenched hill; wires bend; droplets are smeared across walls, paintings, and screens; cameras are chased—to the point of exhaustion. And a woman speaks. She describes strange things, chimeras and hybrids, objects and creatures, buzzing metamorphoses. She’s not talking about things we can see, not exactly, but her descriptions nonetheless hang in air, vivid and alluring. Are we seeing things, things that are there before us? Or are we seeing things, imagined things, hallucinated things, shadows and remainders? Yes and yes. The film asks the viewer to consider the rules that guide and constrain all of these activities, the labor and time it takes to perform them, the utility of this labor and the residues of this time. The world of Shape Games, in the words of the narrator, who is playing a game of her own, offers a bit of safety—certainty, comfort—but is also a trap, an enchanting one.

See this project on FilmFreeway.

See this project at the Video Data Bank.

Performance Research: Megan Bridge, Brendamaris Rodríguez Vélez, Jeanne C. Finley

Narrator and Shape Game Player: Maia Chao