Watch Sabda

Inspired by Indian poetry, philosophy, and religion, video artist Daniel Reeves set out on his own mystical journey through India. SABDA is his lyrical video poem, a collaboration with some of the great Indian medieval poets. In it Reeves succeeds as few Westerners have in revealing the complex reality that is India. The tape is a visual rhapsody of exquisite, luminous, slow-motion imagery. Reeves's movement vocabulary ranges from breathless still images of a moon between two trees to wide, sweeping arcs that shift ground and transport the viewer into a mental state where Shiva indeed seems to dance amid the flames. Loosely swinging his camera, Reeves addresses the eye level of a tiny child or soars heavenward, as though flinging his camera into the air. His sensuous camera movements are like the gestures of a dancer. Their subtlety and grace are further enhanced by digital video effects which produce an illusory sense of reality: In one poignant scene, a woman beggar stands, solid despite her fragile frame, as the material world streams past, transparent and insubstantial. Over lyrical phrases of people walking, working, begging, playing, over landscapes alive to the harvest picker or strangely still and remote, Reeves graphically displays the poems of Kabir, Nammalvar, Basavanna, and Ramprasad Sen. He thus enters into a dialogue with poets, a dialogue between eternal India and the heart of a Western visionary. Deirdre Boyle - Video Classics - 1986