Sparklehorse
The film is divided into three distinct sections: ‘Happy Man’; ‘Good Morning Spider’ and ‘Hundreds of Sparrows.’
‘Happy Man’ suggests a friendship conducted always at a distance – none of the images is presented without formal distancing through colour, collage and printing techniques, while the soundtrack combines a "repressed" musical track with the poignant sound of telephone messages: ‘Call me back when you want your VCR.’
The brief second section ‘Good Morning Spider’ acts as an interlude, providing variations on a primitive scratched image of a spider, with a quiet, eerie musical accompaniment.
The final section ‘Hundreds of Sparrows’ returns to the theme of a (romantic?) relationship. Its images of birds echo the words of the poem/song that is spoken/sung on the soundtrack: ‘You are worth hundreds of sparrows.’
Sound and image together invoke the idea of a surreal form of exchange value, in which one living thing may be taken in exchange for others. ‘Sparklehorse’ is a film that conveys subtly and with characteristic poetry the way people communicate with and value each other in a world of spiralling mediation.
Description source: publicity materials