Trying out some grammar shared with experimental filmmakers. The look of this film was inspired by the connotation of the word "limn" that evokes 'to paint in watercolor.'

Konrad Steiner's first film

Eight films to music, music-to-poetry, and poetry. The film takes its title from the first shot, a single take set to Fauré's setting of "Au bord de l'eau" by René-François Sully-Prudhomme. The image shows a tree in bloom near a stream, during an extraordinarily long warm streak in February, a dream of spring in the middle of winter outside Chicago. A false spring that doomed the exuberant tree's fruit.

San Francisco filmmaker Konrad Steiner took 12 years to complete a montage cycle set to the late Leslie Scalapino’s most celebrated poem, way—a sprawling book-length odyssey of shardlike urban impressions, fraught with obliquely felt social and sexual tensions. Six stylistically distinctive films for each section of way, using sources ranging from Kodachrome footage of sun-kissed S.F. street scenes to internet clips of the Iraq war to a fragmented Fred Astaire dance number.

cinema performance document recorded live at The Warehouse (San Francisco) Sept 22, 2023 music by Andy Way and Joshua Churchill

Two moving pictures side by side relating to each other in various simple ways, to a woman singing six songs about ephemeral love, and Steiner's visit in Japan.

An attempt to respond to three things: 1) my daily life working, living in, and escaping from San Francisco, 2) montage, gesture, and technique in DEAD END DEAD END, a film by Daniel Barnett, and 3) cynicism that could remove one from constructive life. The montage of fine resonances and ecstatic rhythms suggests stories without elaborating a plot idea; this was the formal inspiration from Japanese haikai, or "linked poetry."

Inspired by enjoyment of looking into a bonfire or hearth, seeing shapes coalesce and disperse fleetingly, or by feeling the mind's desire work with the forms of flame that dance. The cinema is a similar form to that. Made without a camera by etching unexposed film with sandpaper, chemicals and light.