The Road to Emmaus

Multimedia

Made to be watched and heard.

The written work on this site argues from the text. This is the other way round: a passage taken as a thing to be seen and listened to, and built until it can be. There are three pieces so far.

3 films · 7:57 · drawn in code, not filmed

Three pieces.

Like Sheep Without a Shepherd 2:10 · with soundtrack · plays in the browser The feeding of the five thousand in Mark 6, sung as Psalm 23 — and the two fit line for line. The crowd comes down out of a dark gorge to still waters; the shepherd with his staff sits them down in green pastures, in companies like garden beds with paths between; a table is prepared, bread goes out hand to hand, and the cup runs over into twelve baskets of what was left. Every frame is drawn as it plays, and every cut lands on a sung word.
Psalm 2 3:35 · with soundtrack · plays in the browser Psalm 2 asks why the nations rage, and answers that the one enthroned laughs. The film takes the joke literally. Four kings push their armies about a map with rakes, the way a war room does; then the camera pulls back, past the castle and the land, until their whole world turns out to be one region on a larger map — and a rake comes in from off-screen to move a cross across it, square by square, while everyone on the board runs for whatever ground is still free. Every frame is drawn as it plays, cut to the track’s eighty bars.
Psalm 87 2:12 · with soundtrack · plays in the browser Psalm 87 names Zion as the birthplace of the nations — Egypt, Babylon, Philistia, Tyre, Cush — and says of one after another, this one was born there. The film is that census: light leaves the citadel, crosses the globe, and the roll is called at the gate. There is no video file behind it. Every frame is drawn as it plays, cut to the soundtrack’s 192 beats.