Beyond the Horizon

A Ghost Light Theaters film installation

In the fall of 2022, I spent some time scanning glass magic lantern slides from the Homer and Betty Peabody Magic Lantern Collection in the library at SDSU. My aspiration was to weave together imagery from the slides with my own still and moving images to create a short film, but I was stumped for a long time by the disparate nature of the material.

The resulting little film Beyond the Horizon embraces that randomness, fashioning the pieces into an ad hoc journey, a dream, a kaleidoscope of story fragments that freely admits to being only the tip of the iceberg. Over time, the ocean gradually emerged as a unifying literal subject itself in the film, but also as a metaphor for a threshold of visibility, limit of understanding, or depth of sub-consciousness intuitive memory—a place in constant ebb and flow, by turns innocent, playful, dangerous, powerful and profound.

The film ends with early mid-century footage of a girl playing on the beach as boats sail beyond the surf. The footage comes from the Society for the Preservation of Other People’s Memories—a website digitizing and archiving the home movies of, well, strangers. Photography and film make ghosts of the present, extracting frames from the flow of time and archiving them for future eyes. In these ghosts, telling their stories in the dark, we may see ourselves, or our future selves. And, in turn, these ghosts are brought to life, for a time, by our attention to them.