The first time this multi-screen presentation was presented  in a commercial movie was thirty-some odd years ago, in The Thomas Crowne Affair, with Steve McQueen.  They used optical printers for that film, in what  must have been an incredibly arduous post-production process.

They learned about the process from Avant-Garde filmmaker who invented it at the World's Fair in Montreal.

Lately, though, the technique has become more popular, thanks to the nonlinear editing capabilities of Final Cut Pro, and the arthouse film Timecode by Mike Figgis.

So, everyone can do this, it's a neat trick to play with, but not everybody can do it well. Timecode,by Mike Figgis, for instance, is admirable as a concept but falls flat emotionally because it's deprived of most of the traditional film grammar that makes movies compelling.

In "Water Belly", Aris has found a perfect subject and style for this kind of multi-screen experiment: a cascading portrait of a fragmented mind.  Up to eight distinct frames on the screen is too much for anyone to take in at once, but this isn't frustrating in "Water Belly" like in Timecode because the frames flow together into a tapestry.  The wall-to-wall music and wall-to-wall voice over, generally a bad idea in filmmaking, successfully unify this film and give it a compelling, urgent  rhythm.

Aris writes voiceover better than anyone I know.  He has several films with this style of free-flowing, stream of consciousness, internal monologue, which is, I think, a unique art form unto itself: part poetry, part screenwriting, part hip-hop.

The music for this film was created by Toussaint Hunt, the star of "The Stabbing of Janet Leigh" by Chris Browne, featured in gallery 04.