13 minutes | 2023 | Experimental | Silent | No Subtitle

Following Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) filming locations from Houston, Texas to Los Angeles, California, I use a 16mm Bolex camera to capture the vastness of the American West. The footage draws me to reminisce about snippets of my everyday life. I contemplate how we perceive the world through analog optical apparatuses and how memories are multidimensional yet fragile. Our recollections of people and places can be distorted, unrecognizable, and fictitious. These memories would eventually diminish with the passing of time. Everything Comes Full Circle is a personal attempt to remember things that will soon be forgotten.

The original footage was shot in Kodak 16mm film stocks during the summer of 2021. The score was composed by London-based composer Julian Tran in the summer of 2023. The digital moving images were inkjet printed on clear film spliced together with perforations cut out with a laser cutter. Each run of the projection makes the printer ink slowly melt, and the film will eventually fall into decay over the course of time.

YANG Lilan (b. 1997, Chongqing, China), is an artist and experimental filmmaker, whose work delves into the flux of migration, the decay of memories and the intricacies of perception. Their work, rooted in 16mm filmmaking, is further enriched by machine learning and data visualization, exploring the materiality and temporality of film. Yang currently lives and works in Boston.