I attended the screening presented by Flaherty NYC titled Tightly Bound Consciousness.  The screening was a combination of nine short films by several different filmmakers.  All the films deal with the physical and psychological mind.  However, I found each film dealt with the topic quite differently.  I realized after the first two films that I wouldn’t be able to have any expectations of what the upcoming films would be like because of the drastic difference between them.  The first film was called Outer Space by Peter Tscherkassky.  It used footage from a horror film but edited it so violently that by the end the footage had turned into blinding, flashing lights.  You lose all sense of what is happening and it even becomes quite uncomfortable.  The second film was called SHLOMO by Ruth Patir.  This film was shot like a documentary but the topic was demons that were inside people’s bodies.  My favorite film, however, was the last one shown.  It was called When You Awake by Jay Rosenblatt.  The film features black and white footage of a couple being hypnotized.  We are then taken into their unconscious mind where we see a variation of random and crazy things.  I enjoyed that this screening featured several short films instead of one long one.  Each film made me think of the human mind and our place in the world differently.  I couldn’t help but leave the theater asking questions like, what does it mean to exist?  What is real and what is happening only in our minds?  Is our own reality different from someone else’s?  Of course I have not answered these questions but I appreciate that these short films forced me to think of them.