Summary

This film juxtaposes extreme close-up film of the activity of ants in the tunnels of an ant farm with a narration by a middle-aged, middle-American male discussing the relation between race riots and the positions of the planets. The narration derives from found tapes I’d discovered in a thrift store that had been recorded by a man named Archie Olson, speaking to his daughter in Minnesota. In other scenes, texts from Joan of Arc and Eldridge Cleaver, patterns of feathers and seeds falling, Harry Partch percussion music, and imagery of multiplying bacteria supply a view of the American political-cultural landscape that continually shifts from the macrocosmic to microcosmic and from practical and conversational to the occult and religious.