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“AN OVERSIMPLICATION OF HER BEAUTY” | writer-director, Terence Nance
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, January 21 9:00 pm –Egyptian Theatre, Park City]
I come from a studio art background and consider myself an artist who made a film. I make music, murals and performances as well, so I hesitate to call myself a filmmaker. That said, I’ve been thinking lately that outside of the “burden of branding,” it doesn’t really matter what I call myself; my work will name me at the end of the day, and I’m interested to hear what that name will be after a few years of making work. So I guess if I am indeed named a filmmaker after that period of time, I will have been one because of its impurity as a medium. Film is sound, it’s performance, it’s photography, (for me) it’s drawing and painting, it’s time, it’s a game, it’s the written word, it’s everything. For me, most importantly, film is no longer physical; it’s an idea that can travel without its creator, it can be everywhere at once, omnipresent and in that way, it is a deity.
I had to make An Oversimplification of Her Beauty as a film and not anything else because of film’s scale. The movie at its heart is a conflation of a small emotion and a seemingly insignificant experience into a larger-than-life emotional rollercoaster. I wanted to illustrate that in a very literal way and how else but to put the situation on the big screen and stretch it out over an hour-and-a-half. Second, the film is goddess worship and at the time of the film’s conception I really wanted to make something that would accurately illustrate how intensely I loved the woman/women the film is about (clearly impressing her was important to me). In that context, it’s a celebration of the women it documents, their majesty, their complexity, their beauty. If you want to deify and impress, you gotta go hard or go home. A painting or a song would have been a half measure; I needed a full measure. Film is big.
