Movie: Protective Coloration

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    This film is a succession of visual and aural "notes" generated by the patterns in animals' hides, which are arranged and re-edited into a complex musical architecture, developing intricate rhythms not unlike the complex syncopations found in traditional African music. Elements of sand, dirt, light and shadow cross-reference the film's emulsion with evolutionary history and provide a second level of musical structuring through which the first layer is filtered. The animals' fur patterns, which evolved naturally as camouflage to hide them from predators, ironically now make the animals more visible to human predators who are attracted by their exotic uniqueness. This cinematic analogy underscores modern humanity's relationship to the natural world.

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    1990-05-16

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