Daniel Barrow’s performance, wistfully narrated by the artist, is accompanied by his endearing, and sometimes brutal, drawings. I’ve seen Barrow’s work before but had no idea I’d love his writing as much as I do his images. And there’s something almost miraculous there: Barrow acknowledges all of the mundane disappointments that the world has to offer us, our own collaboration in these letdowns, and a rather resigned vision of a future in which happy endings rarely occur. But while he does this, he finds a tiny and almost painful beauty in, as he says, the dullness: his mythologizing of himself and the various characters that find a place in his narrative is a fragile and stunning process. As a viewer I found myself both moved and reassured by his confessions that were sometimes marked by bitterness and regret, and his quiet belief that people are at their most beautiful when all of their flaws are put on display.

The drawings were charming and sometimes brutal; Barrow’s self-representation often throws me and he seems to trace himself with a pen that’s simultaneously overly critical and gently forgiving. And this falls in line with the practice of the artist described in his narrative: a character who traces through their windows the faces of citizens sleeping in their beds for an ultimately unrealized phonebook not unlike a yearbook, one that would give every inhabitant their own page that sums up their character and history, with relevant contact details. His story of the phonebook is interlaced with anecdotes about figures from his past including Bag Lady, a boy tortured during childhood for his unfortunate looks and more unfortunate home life. But in each case, even in a passage about a man in a public washroom who is bestowed one of the most unforgiving (and reluctantly funny) character sketches I’ve heard in recent memory, I can’t help feeling that Barrow finds something endearing in everybody.

And I guess in the end that’s what I took home with me - a sense of admiration for Barrow’s vision of the future, and his re-visioning of the past. It’s one that makes room for scars and bad behaviour, and holds fast to a slim cord of faith, love for the world, and all the ordinary people in it.

In b.h. Yael’s Trading the Future, a young guy on the street predicts not only that Europe will be covered in ice in twenty years, but that there is “something” on the way to close the trilogy begun by dinosaurs and then human beings. Yael is confused by the rather bleak prophecies of youth who have not grown up with ideas about religious apocalypse, and sets out in this movie to explore notions of endings and armageddons. The film was an investigation not only of the notion of apocalypse in secular and religious terms, but an offering up of different ways of thinking about the environment, our own thoughts about mortality and natality, and a more hopeful way of conceptualizing death (as one environmentalist points out in the film, the majority of a tree’s work is done after it has “officially” died).

Sometimes technical difficulties have a silver lining. The short film The Garden City by Vera Brunner-Sung (screened before b.h. Yael’s) fell victim to a couple of glitches, but this in fact allowed us to view the piece twice, which made me pretty happy. I was fixated by Brunner-Sung’s conflation of thoughts on an almost entropic Bangalore with reflection on the breakup of a relationship and having the chance to view it again was actually sort of a nice bonus.

My first Images festival was marked by a pretty dizzying array of events; I had sort of imagined my week full of short films (something I was looking forward to), but I was quite surprised by events like the Valerie Project, something I wouldn’t predict experiencing during a film festival. The Live Images programming was stellar, and I think that next year I’m working hard to clear my schedule so that I can see everything, ride buses, bury myself in nothing-but-Images for ten days. Um, Images, you wouldn’t mind shifting your event a little would you - maybe have it during reading week? Thanks.

See you next year.

b.h. Yael’s Trading the Future closed the Images Festival on Sunday night. In essayist form Yael makes a case for a connection between religious (and secular) belief in the apocalypse and our dysfunctional relationship with Nature. Is our unwillingness to respect the limits of growth of the finite system that is our planet a result of the belief that the world is coming to an end or, alternatively, that this world is of lesser importance as eternal life awaits in heaven?

I don’t know anyone who thinks it’s acceptable to plunder and pollute this planet simply because their earthly existence is but a stop on their way to eternal life. However, I do know people concerned about their grandchildren having enough clean water and fresh air. A rapidly growing genre of literature featuring such titles as Global Warming Survival Kit and Peak Oil Survival Guide offer hands-on advice on how to secure heat and drinking water when the grid crashes. A their titles imply, these books are geared toward people who understand that global warming and peak oil production is upon us, people who are already treading lightly on the planet. If anyone’s preparing for the apocalypse it’s the environmentally conscious.

I have reservations around some of the talking heads Yael chooses to feature but I’m glad that she includes an interview with Indian biodiversity activist Vandana Shiva whose beautifully articulated wisdom always resonates. She points out that our obsession with monoculture farming breeds a monoculture of the mind, whereas biodiversity of mind results in compassion and tolerance. By now, we all know that biodiversity - in other words complexity - is sustainable, whereas the destructive monoculture agribusiness championed by academics, biochemical giants like Monsanto and DuPont, manufacturers of heavy farming equipment, and unelected officials of the World Bank, is not. But it is a lesser known fact that, in the long run, biodiversity actually generates a higher yield than large-scale, industrial, monoculture farming.

Biodiversity is based on respect for what architects refer to as genius loci - the spirit of a place - whereas monoculture is based on the assumption that better (short term) yield in the American Midwest equals better yield in Bolivia. Biodiversity is based on a connection, a knowledge of, a relationship with a particular place - in short, a home. So it is somewhat ironic but, more importantly, symptomatic for my generation that Yael’s film lacks a sense of home. She flies to England and Israel, goes to New York and the West Coast but the footage from these places isn’t in any way essential to the film. Yael was born in Israel but grew up in Canada. Her film is a personal one but it isn’t geographically anchored; there is no physical, experiential center in which her story takes its beginning. Many of us who have moved, and moved again, perhaps from the country to the city, perhaps across continents, lack or have lost that connection with nature, that sense of home. If you live in Israel, water shortages and depleted aquifers are very real problems. If you grew up in Newfoundland, chances are that you remember when the cod disappeared - pretty much overnight.

Division of labour has removed us from our sources of power and fuel as well as from the land and water that sustain us. I haven’t grown anything edible in my entire life and yet, miraculously, I have food on the table every day. As long as there is food on the grocery store shelves it’s hard to drum up the energy to go out and protest against the overfishing of the oceans. As long as there is potable water coming out of the tap it’s hard to get motivated to start fighting for a ban on toxic substances in shampoos and dish detergents and so on. But if you’re witnessing the destruction of the land and your livelihood right before your eyes you will fight and defend that which sustains you and your family, even if that means that you have to go up against Monsanto’s legion of lawyers or chain yourself to the petrochemical plant upstream. Today, there are more inmates than farmers in the United States. Yael makes several important points but I think the division of labour - not Christian fatalism - is the real reason for our failure to abandon our unsustainable way of life. Our overuse of finite resource has become so blatant that anyone who takes a closer look - with the exception of economists - is bound to see that we’re on a crash course. Trading the Future is really more of a text than a film. But it’s personal and earnest and ultimately, because of its earnestness, I am moved by it. And I’m sure Yael’s essay of a film will spark fruitful discussions. I’m surprised that Images chose to close the festival with it, but perhaps it’s a sign of our times. And we know that Images likes to surprise. I look forward to seeing what’s in the bag next year.

-Johan Hultqvist

The seventh installment in the International shorts series offers a well curated evening of films that could be classified as subtle sci-fi. None of the three films in the program aspire to be science fiction but they all possess a haunting, post-apocalyptic feel or seem to be filmed on a planet strangely similar to ours. Pavel Medvedev’s On the Third Planet From the Sun (2006) is a slow, beautiful, suggestive documentary. Medvedev takes us to the Arkhangelsk area near the Arctic Circle in Northern Russia, where the Russian army carried out tests of the hydrogen bomb in 1961. Forty-five years later the military is gone and, supposedly, so is the radiation. By and large, the local Pomors still live the way they have for centuries; people are still preoccupied with fishing, hunting and growing plants. But the nearby rocket launching site has brought with it a new type of hunt, the hunt for “space garbage”. We follow two Pomor brothers as they make their way across the swampy summer taiga on snowmobiles held together with duct tape and prayers, scouring the bogs for rocket debris that they can salvage and sell as scrap.

The film features a series of powerful portraits of Pomors. Medvedev’s subjects walk into the frame, then stop and silently stare straight into the camera. In the absence of words and music, the effect is that they seem able to see me as clearly as I see them. I am no longer simply a voyeur in the dark of a movie theatre. Our eyes meet and the long silent exchange of looks is so intense that it almost becomes awkward.

One of the film’s most beautiful and unsettling scenes captures patients shuffling out into the dim corridors of some kind of decrepit hospital ward. As if blinded or drunk or aboard a lilting ship, these sad creatures stumble down the hall, using the walls for support. There are no voiceovers or subtitles explaining what we are witnessing. Medvedev lets the gorgeous 35 mm images speak for themselves, many of which seem inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinematic language. There are numerous parallels to Stalker and its close-ups of debris and abandoned buildings in a beautiful but harsh landscape that has survived unspecified, manmade disasters.

Tarkovsky’s influence can also be seen in the work of Michael Robinson and Ben Rivers. The close-ups of inanimate objects, the camera that stays close to the ground, hovering over puddles of water, rain falling on tiles etc. In fact, in the post-screening Q&A Robinson admitted that Stalker was perhaps his favourite film of all time, but the Tarkovsky influence is maybe even more pronounced in Rivers’ work.

Michael Robinson’s film Victory Over the Sun features an array of what once was futuristic architecture at various World Fair sites (including the Montreal Expo) but you’ve never seen it quite like this before. Robinson makes a brilliant move by shooting the structures obscured by greenery, which sets an eerie tone. You get the sense that Mother Nature has reclaimed what always belonged to her. The famous structures that once represented progress, Utopian optimism and a firm belief in the religion of technology (remember DuPont’s “Better Living Through Chemistry” slogan?) seem overgrown like ancient temple ruins in the jungle. People are nowhere to be seen, but the unsettling audio track plays unintelligible chants that sound like confessions of faith or people collectively asking for forgiveness. What do we want tomorrow’s great projects to look like? Is the era of the large, national schemes over? Have we, as Arundhati Roy hopes, begun to dismantle the big and entered the century of the small and the local?

Ben Rivers’ Ah Liberty! sets out to celebrate a rural existence largely outside society. Rivers takes us to an isolated farm in Scotland, a farm where children are herding cattle along a beautiful river but also a farm that is home to a scrap yard. The black and white images of children playing in dirty piles of junk among car tires and empty oil barrels could be fifty years old or taken from a third world setting. The grainy 16 mm footage captures a timeless beauty but also something ominous, amplified by the clanging, screaming and thundering scrap metal.

In a scene that could be taken from any given Western, Rivers has climbed up onto the ridge of the foothills to let the camera survey the valley below – bringing to mind the pioneer dreams of new frontiers. During the post-screening Q&A, London-based Rivers admitted that he idealizes and longs for the rural setting that he grew up in although he can’t see himself settling down in the countryside anytime soon. I make the very same statement from time to time. And I’m sure I’m not the only country boy turned city kid who does. There are many of us who are starting to feel uneasy about how disconnected we’ve become from that which sustains us and all other life. Ah, Liberty! makes horses and cars seem equally alien. Maybe enough Westerners have become so far removed from Nature in a generation or two that it is the natural that is starting to look foreign and hostile. Today, Rivers’ film leaves me feeling somewhat uneasy. Hopefully I’ll see it in a different light twenty years from now.

-Johan Hultqvist

Live Images V was a meeting between image-artist Charles Atlas and guitarist/audio-artist Alan Licht. Although the two gentlemen have known each other for a while, they have never previously collaborated. So, this was like an initial encounter. Mr. Atlas brings in film/video stocks (Edison’s Sandow The Strongman proto-physique film was rather prominent), and then plays utilized two laptops to process moving pictures from four DVD-players. Atlas composes live - he is an improviser as is Licht, who last night at least was working with primarily a noise-guitar aesthetic. (Licht has worked with Lee Rinaldo of Sonic Youth, among others).

As this event was an initial encounter, there were a few getting to know you moments, although the two artists were performing as much parallel with one another as in any prior/post or top/bottom arrangement. Both faced the audience - Licht was not watching Atlas’ images and image-manipulations. I found the more abstract portions of Atlas’ image-improvisation the most aesthetically pleasing. Is this because I am attracted to abstraction myself, or does this attraction have to do with a modernist This Is Beautiful Because I’ve Never Seen This Before mindset. Like many improvised performances or events, there were highs and also a few lows or lulls. But the highs were pretty high. Some audience members found the event dated, but perhaps timeless was a better word. Video-painting/sculpture interfacing has been around since the video-medium’s origins over fourty years ago, and live music was key to cinematic presentation before sound became welded to image. Timeless- now there’s that word again - time.

After the Atlas/Licht collaboration, it was then off to The Gladstone for an entirely Super-8 programme - No Cuts, No Splices. Plenty of creative in-camera editing, though. Smart Super-8 filmmaking has always involved either knowing exactly what one is going to do and then doing it in one take, or else taking chances and editing in-camera or on the fly. There were many highly creative deployments of this timeless but unfortunately endangered stock. There was speed achieved by shooting slowly - there was even flickering. How many single-frame shots are we looking at here? Epic, but small and hands-on epic. I did get nostalgic for the late Splice This festival, but this was a tightly curated programme, as a programme rather then a social-scene (although the relatively informal venue was appreciated - even with the next-door karaoke!) should be. Personal highlights included Snapper Doodle (Arlea Ashcroft & Andrea von Wichert) and Green Fuse (Daichi Saito). From smart and hilariously broad-humour to smart and austere or rigorous in one fell swoop. Timeless.

Well, today I am off to a panel titled Media Art Matters, matters also of course referring to materials. Everybody attending this 21st Images Festival presumably agrees that media art does matter, and/but then what?

i’ve been thinking about this for almost two days and realizing that i really can’t write about it because there is no way i’ll do it justice. so here are a few of the reasons that it was an almost perfect experience (for me), and why i tried to find a way to get to cornell university the next night to see it again, and why you should be really, really sorry if you missed it.

1. i managed to get a seat (not as simple as it sounds)

2. ten musicians (not sure how a crowded stage acts as a harbinger of amazing music but it somehow always does)

4. why is it that seeing a harp on stage almost feels like you’ve seen a unicorn?

5. soft-focus frizzy hair that i think became unre-creatable after 1973

6. white cotton. white cotton. white cotton.

7. vampires and earrings

8. vampires and jodhpurs

9. tracy nakayama

i am now officially trying to wear down the needle on my record player by obsessively playing the studio recording 24 hours a day. thanks images.

(go here to find out more, and here for a tiny sample)

Late yesterday afternoon, I dropped into the opening for the Documentary Uncertainty exhibition at A Space. Three strong artists - Stephen Andrews, John Greyson, and Hito Steyerl - not only problematize dissemination and reception of documentary images but also the images’ veracity - the images’ origins and initial intentions or purposes. Greyson’s and Steyerl’s projections add to a trope that has been playing throughout this 21st Images Festival - concerning the precarity of film stocks and archives and film as a medium/material. Both of these artists are dealing with lost or destroyed film and attempts to recreate. Steyerl’s Film Journal No.1 deals with the activist archivist restorer uncovering authorial and temporal limitations of what she is attempting to recreate, while Greyson’s 14.3 Seconds presents six restorations from the 14.3 seconds of film scraps surviving the bombing of Iraq’s film archives during the war. Steyerl’s and Greyson’s installations are smartly complimented by Andrews’ Yesterday’s News Remembered Today, in which the artist has downloaded an explosive image from the Iraq war from the Internet and then hand-rendered in crayon drawings rubbed over a window screen on mylar or parchment. Andrews recreates the dot-matrix look of newspaper images and/or computer screens while acknowledging the voids between the dots. All three artists are drawing attention to images one doesn’t or can’t see - images (and histories) that documentary projects must nevertheless acknowledge the presence of.

Then I went to the Workman Theatre to see Charles Atlas’ Hail the New Puritan, which is neither literal documentary nor fantasy but performative and an example of the filmmaker/videographer as performer/dancer. Produced in the mid-eighties in Thatcherite Britain, Hail the New Puritan presents a day in the whirlwind life of punk-dance choreographer sensation Michael Clark and his glorious “company”. This is a gem celebrating drag on the dole, with performative/interventions in the streets and in makeshift studios. There are cameos by the likes of performance artist/designer Leigh Bowery, Fall curmudgeon (and verbal dancer) Mark E. Smith, and others. The party at the end of the day is breathtaking to watch. Clark and his fellow dervishes are matched by Atlas’ camera with its ins and outs and in-betweens and underneaths and sharp concrete circles. While very much of its period, I was reminded of Warhol’s often down-below cruisy camera and also Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, with its lack of montage and emphasis on cinematic and gender fluidities. Hail The New Puritan (Not!). However, the cinema was only half full. Too bad - perhaps preparing and/or preparing for examinations is a necessary priority for many artists and audiences?

On Thursday afternoon, I paid a visit to Diaz Contemporary Gallery to take in Paulette Philips’ installation - History Appears Twice: The First Time as Tragedy the Second Time as Farce. This is a thoughtfully conceived and installed installation utilizing video and sculpture. Philips sets up opposition between the elements of her installation, based on the personal histories of modernist architects Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier. One room houses a 32 minute videotape which inventories a famous house - a modernist ruin. The House (coded or named as E1027) was built by Gray, usurped by Le Corbusier, and subsequently deserted by Gray. Now the house has not only decayed but also been claimed - one or more graffiti artists have been here. My favourite component of Philips’ installation is an activated mirror that denies narcissists the privilege of their close-ups. One stares into the mirror, sees a brief self-confirmation, and then the mirror pivots away. This is a cruel and witty time-based sculpture. It acidly mirrors collaborations and/or relationships which unsettling turns for the worse.

And then I had to top off my day with Winnipeg Wunderkind - Daniel Barrow. This phenomenon has achieved renown for his “manual animations”, combining overhead projection with video, soundtrack music, and live narration. This is both performing and performative art - a co-presentation with the Harbourfront World Stage Festival. Barrow’s latest manual animation is called Every Time I see Your Picture I Cry. This time, Barrow’s trajectory weaves through “Helen Keller” as a stand-in for one who is different (and probably psychic) through the artist as literal garbage collector/scavenger to the artist/collector being pursued by a serial killer. Serial killers are of course notoriously obsessed with phone books and lists and inventories. They cast a wide net with a singular focus. Barrow works with a wide palette while maintaining intimacy. It’s that voice and the complexity - the hands-on-ness, of all that he does in performance. He writes his lines but he also learns them. And, like all good phone book queens, he spends a lot of time with The Smiths.

There’s a reason we don’t see a lot of contemporary dance on film; it rarely translates well to the screen. Nor does it age well; most modern dance isn’t very modern or relevant twenty years later. One exception that comes to mind is local hero Danny Grossman’s 1981 masterpiece Endangered Species, which brought me to tears when I finally saw it last year. The work of Scottish choreographer Michael Clark, introduced to me on Wednesday night through Charles Atlas’ 1986 film Hail the New Puritan, does absolutely nothing for me. To be fair, I should point out that Clark was only 23 when the movie was made. But if you love Michael Clark’s punk ballet please write and explain to me what it is that I fail to appreciate .

The 1986 pseudo-doc is an 85-minute portrait of a hard-partying London artist community with bad teeth halfway through a decade plagued by unfortunate aesthetics, drugs and politics. With waves of 80s nostalgia washing over us I can see how Atlas’ film could be of interest to some as a time capsule, documenting the London art scene at a time of extreme excess and unprecedented unemployment. I can see how a gray and dreary England in disrepair under Thatcher would create an urge for distraction and amusement, an urge for decadence and costumed escapism. “When you have a lot of nerve you can do anything”, Michael Clark tells a (fictional) reporter. But the rebellion feels juvenile and the art hollow; it comes off as all surface and no substance. However, if your idea of a good time is watching bare-assed dancers strut around among fried-egg flower sculptures to the sounds of The Fall’s Mark E. Smith yelping and squealing words like ‘omnipresent’ and ‘ineffectual’, then Hail the New Puritan is for you.

-Johan Hultqvist

I didn’t take yesterday off from the festival. I did go to the International Shorts programme, which was about narrative and memory. So many images are about memory - how to remember, how one never entirely remembers - how true events become fiction due to the passing of time and the processes of narration. All very true, and then what?
I went to an International shorts programme tonight about landscape as a verb. To landscape. The ingrained and the possible alternative ways of landscaping. Landscape referring not only to relatively unmediated nature but also to mores and customs and politics. And also languages. Nikamovin (Song), by Kevin Lee Burton, was a wonderful short videotape about recovery and reconstruction (opposite of deconstruction) of the Cree language. Phonetics become rhythmic and landscapes become electronic on top of acoustic and oral traditions become fluidly intertwined with electronic digital practices. Burton’s tape blends urban and rural, pastoral and techno. He rejects these still very entrenched but ultimately false binaries, and also poses the very direct question as to why have the Cree and other aboriginal languages become so precarious.
Also included in this programme (Blurring the Terrain of Landscape as a Verb) was Nocturne (lampedusa-fort Europe), by the Belgian artist Pieter Geenen. Lampedusa is an Italian island which is the closest European point to Northern Africa. It is therefore a site for African, Asian, and Middle Eastern asylum seekers, who make their moves by means of small boats. This completely silent film looks out at the flickering lights of Lampedusa. Sometimes there are only a few lights and sometimes many more. There appears to be perhaps nightlife across the bay, but for considerable stretches this appears to be an almost completely dark film characterized by minimal light phenomena. If I had not read the programme notes after the screening, I would have thought the work to be totally abstract and formalist. But the stillness of the film and its camera position does create suspense or tension - duration-related tension. And every shifting of legs or seating positions became so amplified in the Workman theatre. It was a pretty intense twenty-eight minutes.
I was curious about the Live Images presentation that followed, The Conversation, a.k.a. Everything is Everything, by Tasman Richardson and Kentaro Taki. This was a live or performative dialogue between a Canadian and Japanese artist with relatively parallel practices. Both artists characteristically deploy rapidly-montaged stock/appropriated images, frequently downloaded from television and/or “popular culture”. After each artist played a brief solo (Kentaro a 1998 piece, Richardson a 2004), they…uh…jammed. The two image-composers positioned themselves in front of the screen in the manner of two turntables, and improvised with reasonably loose guidelines. Start with news anchors or talking heads; move on to drama sans dialogue, and then hit the world of advertising. The session began quite slowly, too slowly. Talking heads talk, so it took until the manipulated drama and especially the ad-clips for the two to begin seriously riffing off of each other rather than tentatively stop-starting. There were some great hip-hop culture jam moments, but they were moments. And the bits that worked the best sonically involved repeated images. Perhaps a third image/sound source might have permitted a greater fluidity, or was that part of the intention?

For the longest time I avoided anthologies of short fiction. To be honest I found them almost frightening; they were tiny slices of writing that required me to focus quickly, perhaps abruptly, only to be abandoned once I had found my footing. It was all a little traumatizing.

More recently though I’ve developed an almost obsessive love for this process. My year with a 1500-page anthology of fiction from the Paris Review has been schizophrenic and satisfying; stories have become conflated in my mind with author interviews, pieces of ephemera, insignificant anecdotes from my own life. Lately I’ve been reading an anthology of stories about love edited by Jeffrey Eugenides, and I am now prepared to confess an addiction to the sense of absorption and loss that comes with becoming fully engaged with each tale and then being left behind.

Watching the films in last night’s program gave me a similar sensation; in each case, there was a slim thread of narrative that I clung to, becoming wound in and then abruptly released. In Divya Mehra’s parodic Pants, a young Indian woman is abducted by her male companion who has been influenced by her father to rescue her from her Canadianized habit of wearing trousers; while the intentions of the two male characters in the film are clearly laid out for us, we are denied any resolution of the story. We literally read this narrative as we follow it through slapstick subtitles; the stern patriarch who rails against Starbucks and Canadian culture and the ineffective younger man who is rendered helpless by his dismay at slacks on a woman. Of course, the subtitles fail to match the movements of the mouths of each character, not only suggesting that there is another story being denied us, but perhaps mimicking a childhood habit of filling the mouths of characters in foreign films with our own dialogue. The work ends with a long shot in which the female culprit, eyes wide, pleads with her panicked captor; we are denied any subtitles to communicate her pleas. We’re left with a final shot as she is seized and carried away into another room.

This play with narrative and a focused attention on a synoptic anecdote, detail, or character continues through the rest of the films. In Here We Are by Kim Sheppard, a collection of snippets from Youtube videos suggests half-formed or half-forgotten memories confused by time and distance. Christine Negus’s Blue Water, a seven-part reminiscence of a town and a time experienced when the filmmaker was young reveals not only an intense dissatisfaction with revisiting the places we build from nostalgia, but a sort of catalogue of the ways in which we imagine those places through visual or olfactory impressions, snippets of dialogue, insignificant moments, the way the light fell on that one pivotal afternoon.

In Andrea Cooper’s Fickle as Poison a tale about a woman who is almost shot at her own wedding is woven by a dangerous and elusive pairing of characters: the man who held the gun and the woman at which he aimed it, played by a single actor. After the film Andrea Cooper explained that the narrative was based on a story told by her grandmother about her own grandmother who had lived through being grazed by a bullet at her Irish maritime wedding. Cooper recounted the process by which she and her family members built this story over time, adding and substituting details, accepting and rejecting the anecdote in a continuous ritual of storytelling. The film works in the same way as each of the two characters offers details not only about the scandalous event but their own nature, and we are drawn into each of the two figures as they begin to seem less and less distinguishable from each other, both of them reckless, wild, and filled with menace. Again, we are stranded as the film ends at the moment that we are beginning to develop allegiances, sympathies, affection.

The works by Nina Yuen, Penny Lane, and Kevin Jerome Everson continue this investigation of a fixation with a single incident, thought, or conversation. Male characters are almost absent in this series of films; when they are present, they seem to imply danger, absence, or betrayal. What we are left with seems as much an investigation of memory as it is of the heady precariousness of being a girl, and the various traps and snares to which we fall victim. But more than anything else, I was left with the feeling that I had spent an evening reading through an anthology of stories about longing and forgetting, incidents that will coalesce over time, become one thing, fused.