Prelude (Foreplay/Mourning)

Directed by Konrad Steiner

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.