the Myth of Narcissus

The Myth of Narcissus enacts what Walter Murch describes as the editor's essential task: to dream the film into being. The Myth of Narcissus was built entirely within this logic. There was no script, no shot list—only a performer inhabiting the archetypes of Narcissus and Echo, engaging with an interactive installation called The Pond, while the camera witnessed without directing. The footage arrived in post-production as raw symbolic matter, and the edit became a process of listening for what Murch calls "the blink"—those junctures where meaning coheres not through intention but through recognition.

For The Myth of Narcissus, that center was mythological: the film searches its material for synchronicities, visual rhymes, and moments where the ancient story of self-reflection surfaces unbidden in contemporary gesture and screen-mediated image. Olivia Louise's practice takes Murch's intuitive model and extends it into explicitly ritualistic territory—the dreaming room as sacred space, the edit as a form of scrying. The result is a film that feels less constructed than revealed, a participatory reenactment that implicates the viewer in its central question: how do we project onto, fetishize, and ultimately lose ourselves in the mirror of our own objectified existence?

As the Wilamette Weekly writes, "In Greek mythology, Narcissus was enamored with his own reflection, but the myth of Narcissus is more interested in the dehumanizing power of computers. Tiana Garoogian stars as Narcissus, whose face we only see on screens or in reflection. The character has their mythological predecessor’s vanity, but the film feels like a meditation on how the internet both liberated and imprisoned us during quarantine."

Originally commissioned for the Pink Noise Multi Media Exhibition in Portland, hosted by Sarah Turner (https://www.sarahsarahturnerturner.com/)

The work then underwent a greater editorial development during the lockdown of 2020 -- a process that was made in partnership with the Risk/Reward queer film festival in Portland, Oregon, where it premiered.

Screened again in 2021 as part of the Seattle's NW Film Forum's Local Shortiez festival and the MOVING BODY Festival in Bulgaria

Part of the official selections of the Oregon Short Film Festival, The New Film Underground of LA and the Experimental Films Online Festival (hosted in El Carmen, Mexico) in 2022.

Guerilla QR Code Taggers in Brazil included the short film as part of their INQRVENTION, a digital and spontaneous alternative approach to a film festival.