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Looking closely at flowing water can be a
hypnotic experience; the subtle shifts and eddies mesmerize.
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Water’s
Way
-reflections
on awareness
Video
images from the natural world, spoken word and music from
Celtic, to American folk, to classical, coalesce in an
enigmatic evocation of the fluid in Water’s Way,
a documentary from WSKG-TV.
To
order a VHS video tape
of Water's
Way for $19.95
e-mail mail@wskg.pbs.org
or phone (607)729-0100, ext. 343
(Price includes
shipping & handling) |
Written
and produced by former WSKG staffer Tom
Milligan, Water's Way is conceived
less as a traditional documentary than as a piece of art
segmented into several sections. "You
might learn the odd new fact about water, but it’s the emotional
response it’s trying to evoke, the way a painting does. The
point is to look at water closely, let ourselves feel what
looking
at it does to us, reflect on the awareness it evokes, and
on the ways
in which, as some have suggested, water is a kind of sense
organ for the earth."
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At the boundary,
where the cold air meets the relatively warm water, water
vapor becomes visible; the kingfisher is out hunting early
this morning.
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The
images, collected from roughly half the counties WSKG serves,
strive to capture the fragility and power of water in the
natural world in all the seasons, seeking to remind us
that it is water that dissolves all things even as it’s
creating all things, responding to the same force that
shaped the first moments of the universe. |
Music
for the program is by Harp & Harmony, an ensemble of acoustic
musicians from the Utica area whose work the producer had heard
live and in recorded form on several occasions. "I hadn’t
heard the music when I was collecting these images, but they
fit together so well, it was synchronicity. Truly, there are
no coincidences."
Water wears away stone, dissolves its locked-up nutrients,
carries them to the plants which sustain us all. |
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Vortices form in response to obstructions in the current
underneath the surface. And what question might this
vortex be asking? |
Air obeys the same laws of motion as water; the spray from
the falls at floodtide shows something of the complexity
of flow within the borders the stream. |
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The calligraphy of moonlight on the ruffled surface of the
slow-moving stream. |
Peggy
Spencer, the ensemble’s harpist, arranger, and sometimes-composer,
also collected hours of natural sound from the Shawangunk Nature
Preserve, Harp & Harmony’s home base, which enhances the
soundtrack of Water’s
Way.
Water's
Way was edited by Chris
Hopkins, and Peter
Bombar, Chief Engineer of Open
Studios/Public Productions, did the audio post-production.
Tom Milligan’s earlier productions include Seventh
Generation: What Columbus Learned, Nights
at the Opera, and The
Crystal City.
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Clouds do not fall because they have never risen; they
are made of tiny droplets of water which have condensed
around tiny fragments of dust in the air.
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A string of vortices spins out continuously
from the flow of water around rock. |
Sometimes the wind will show us forms
quite like the forms we see in water. |
Water's
Way
To
order a VHS video tape
of Water's
Way for $19.95
e-mail mail@wskg.pbs.org
or phone (607)729-0100, ext. 343
(Price includes
shipping & handling)
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