A Film By Bette Gordon

"Gorgeously Shot - A Gem!" - Shari Roman, Flaunt Magazine "****4 & 1/2 Stars!" - Jan Stuart, Newsday "Fascinating!" - Amy Taubin, The Village Voice "Funny, Unnerving...Nuanced and  Shocking...Visual Poetry!" - A.O. Scott, The New York Times Ten year old Phillip Davis has spent half his life joyously living on the California highways with his carefree and highly seductive mother. Every night is a road, every man is a map, and no love is stronger than the love Phillip feels for his mom. Mom is light and Mom is motion.  So when Mom decides to settle down and lead an average life with an average American man, Phillip sees himself as her savior, and his mission is to liberate Mom. At first, he appears to succeed, but an unexpected event sidetracks his plans: Phillip's powerful father re-enters his life and he wants his family back. Oedipus was lucky - he was ignorant of his crime. But Phillip is all too aware of his situation and he knows exactly what he must do to regain a life in motion. Phillip's obsessive love for his mother is intense and perhaps perverse but it is also as innocent and psychologically familiar as Humbert Humbert's hopeless love for Lolita. Ultimately, Phillip learns that Mom is a world all her own and there are some places we must all go alone. Director's Statement "Luminous Motion" is the story of paradise lost, of one child's fall from heaven to earth, from Eden into banality. When we first meet Phillip, he is driving with his mother through a garish neon hyperspace, where every motel and man are identical signposts on the road to nowhere. Phillip's childhood is the ultimate adolescent fantasy: A separate world where there are no boundaries for the love between mother and son. But childhood can't remain the innocent and uncomplicated place that Phillip desires. As the film progresses, Phillip encounters various forces that overwhelm his pure love for mom. he struggles against the inevitable and fundamental human growth process: the experience and acceptance of separation and loss. Light and Movement - the "Luminous Motion" of the title - are the central elements of the film, both visually and thematically.   Traditionally in film, reality is portrayed as sharp and clear, while fantasy and dreams are fuzzy. For "Luminous Motion" I've reversed these models of representation. Phillip's real worlds is the back seat of Mom's car. Normal everyday objects and people and places - the stuff of reality to just about everybody else - are blurs of color in the rear-view mirror. Mom, on the other hand, is etched in clear, bright luminescence, dazzling clear, the center of Phillip's world and its very source of light.   Through Phillip's eyes, there is always something off, some strange detail which introduces the unfamiliar and unbalanced: an image seen through the window that doesn't fit; the unmade bed of a sleazy motel, a man's naked body crisscrossed with the colored lined and symbols of a road map. No other character sees Pedro quite the way that Phillip does, or talks to Dad on a phone that may or may not exist. Even Phillip's aural reality is a hallucinatory landscape, with recognizable elements recombined and heightened in strange and startling ways.   When Mom's car crashes, Phillip's entire world is destroyed. At Pedro's house, inertia takes over and light itself changes. Colors become muted, less vibrant. Phillip's room feels claustrophobic - in contrast to the interior of the car, which never felt cramped. Life on the road was Phillip's universe, an infinite space, while Pedro's house is a finite, enclosed space. For Mom, who needs a break, settling down is a relief; for Phillip, it's a profound shock. Mom's retreat is Phillip's expulsion. The interaction between Phillip and Mom is the physiological key to the story. While it is Phillip's world that we inhabit, Phillip is a projection of his mom - he is a projection of her desire for freedom and escape.  Throughout the film, one of my biggest challenges was to find a way to make the complexities of the mother character understandable. Once a woman becomes a mother, our society does not expect her to have a sexual life with desire, conflicts, struggles. But Mom is full of contradictions: While she loves Phillip, she chooses a lifestyle that doesn't benefit him. While she is an individualist who flees into complete freedom, she also yearns for security. While she thrives on the unconditional love that she gets from her son, she also wants to protect him from a world that had hurt her -n "to create worlds inside." But the outside world - in the form of Dad - encroaches on their world. Mom's plan doesn't work, and she recognizes her complicity in Phillip's growing dark side. To order the video for Luminous Motion visit: www.wellspringvideo.com Artistic License provides Playdate information.