Gabriel

Gabriel (1976) is the only film by the Canadian-American painter Agnes Martin. It is 78 minutes in length, and features a little boy going for a walk in a natural landscape.

The film opens with a shot of a mountain, and then shows waves lapping at the shore. A little boy, the eponymous Gabriel, is shown standing with his back to the camera, looking out to sea. He wears shorts, a white T-shirt and a pair of brown hiking boots. In the next shot, he sits on a rock looking out at the ocean: this shot has an intense red filter over it. Naturalistic color returns, and the film then follows Gabriel on a walk, as he traverses first a riverside path, then a mountain path. In the middle section of the film, the boy does not feature at all: for about twenty minutes the film consists only of close-up shots of flowers and water. At about fifty minutes through the film, Gabriel appears again, walking through sparse woodland. A sequence of close up shots of birch trees follows. The final minutes of the film intercut Gabriel’s walk with flower and water shots. He finishes his walk sitting on a hill, looking out at the view. The film ends with a shot of a rock in the sea with waves swelling over it.

All the shots are handheld. The film is silent, apart from seven moments at which excerpts from Bach’s Goldberg Variations come in for two or three minutes at a time.