Lighthouse

We see the timeless figure of a reading woman by the pool side. The camera pans slowly past smooth white walls, warm wooden doors, onto the edge of the paved area, where the woman now sits, yet again. We are back in the first frame of the film. The man standing close by turns to face her, and frames the woman into an imaginary image, seated there, on the boundary between the built environment and the woods. She appears merely a visitor now, a fleeting presence by the pool side, whereas the reading figure radiated a calm sense of belonging. The film Lighthouse was shot on 16 mm film at Maison Louis Carré in Bazoches-sur-Guyonne, central France. The focus of the work is the house designed by Alvar Aalto in 1959, commissioned by the art collector Louis Carré and his wife Olga. The building was erected on an elevated spot with a view over rural expanses, making their home a prominent landmark. The woods around it have now grown high and the house has become a time capsule, a reminder of its own era. The film takes us to these material and mental borderlines between the architectural and the organic, the constructed and the growing. It navigates the house and its grounds along its boundaries, skimming along half-walls and pausing at the wooden grilles that open and close the flow of view as well as air between the inside and the outside of the building. Sounds and images do not frame together a fluid singular narrative or space-time in the film, but rather direct attention towards diverse parallel events, experiences and points of view. The spoken lines are partly from Virginia Woolf´s novel To the Lighthouse (1927).