Meshes of the Afternoon

Maya Deren
,
US
,
1943
,
16mm
,
15'

Meshes of the Afternoon’s dream-like mise-en-scene, illogical narrative trajectory, fluid movement and ambient soundtrack invite a type of contemplative, perhaps even transcendental, involvement for the spectator. The film is constructed from a myriad of eyeline matches and mismatches. The use of extreme angles to imply one character looking down on the dreamer, a type of spider’s point of view, foreshadows the dreamer’s death.

I See Red

Adrian Paci
,
AL, IT
,
2020
,
HD
,
12'

The screen is filled with a pulsating red that, for just a few moments, is interrupted by the appearance of an eye. The almost paradoxical choice to address the drama of domestic violence through the negation of images suggests the “impossibility” of telling this story. The eyes that fleetingly appear come from video portraits of Syrian refugee women that Paci filmed in Beirut in 2018. An original text written and performed by playwright and actress Daria Deflorian provides the narrative structure. Vedo rosso (I See Red) is a polyphonic composition for color and voice; weaving together three threads of isolation, coercion, and negation, both spatial and internal, it examines limitations—physical, psychological, individual, and collective—and the longing to overcome them. (Leonardo Bigazzi)

 

Commissioned and produced by in between art films for the project Mascarilla 19 – Codes of Domestic Violence 

English subtitles

Defenestration

Bea Haut
,
UK
,
2015
,
16mm
,
5'

Mixing up film and domestic structures, this film reaches beyond the frame, testing out access and escape, aperture and portal. The letraset sound also bumps its way across the frame boundary into the visible.

Flowers blooming in our throats

Eva Giolo
,
BE, IT
,
2020
,
HD
,
9'

Flowers blooming in our throats - teaser

Everyday occupations, some domestic tools, fruits, light, rope and many hands. Hands that dig in the earth, that cut, that cook, that touch, rip, wash, squeeze, erase, press, push. The sound of domestic spaces and its silence. Red flowers one summer. Flowers blooming in our throats is a cinematic poem in response to the worldwide pandemic of 2020.

Filmed in 16mm just after the lockdown caused by COVID-19, Flowers blooming in our throats is an intimate, poetic portrait of the fragile balances that govern everyday life in a domestic setting. The artist films a group of her friends in their own homes, performing various small actions in accordance with her instructions. Giolo chooses to walk a shifting line where gestures remain symbolically ambiguous, expressing a kind of violence that is not immediately recognizable. Hands try to support or escape, but also to grip or strike, in a subtle interweaving of sounds and references that adds to the viewer’s sense of tension and unease. A dialogue of gestures, made up of repeated visual sequences where time is marked by the spinning of a small toy top, as unstable and precarious as the balance of a relationship. The artist repeatedly uses a red filter on her lens, creating a conceptual device that relies on an element of abstraction to conceal and transfigure the image. The mechanical insertion of the filter over the lens thus becomes the simulation of a violent act, immediately changing the way we perceive and remember an action we have seen before. This coexistence of opposites can also be found in the title, which metaphorically suggests how the beauty of a natural phenomenon—and implicitly, love – can turn into a suffocating force. (Leonardo Bigazzi)

 

Commissioned and produced by in between art films for the project Mascarilla 19 – Codes of Domestic Violence 

Home

Margaret Salmon
,
UK
,
2019
,
HD
,
5'

A short film depicting a woman putting her children to sleep, cleaning dishes, then dancing with a ghost. Shot on Super 16mm film, Home uses the physical material of film, and expressive bodies, to interpret emotional and imaginative relationships between daily tasks, gendered histories and restorative fantasy. The film shows a progression from the mundane to the extraordinary through the use of realist aesthetics paired with analogue double exposure. A woman cares, moves, isolated, repetitive, before being embraced, encountered by a ghost. They touch, caress and gradually dance together, moving in unison, finding each other in sombre mournful reverie. The ghost and woman finally rest together, and the woman then returns to her children, after this brief moment of resistance and restoration.

Kitchen Beets

Bea Haut
,
UK
,
2019
,
16mm
,
1'

Never-ending tidying up turned into rhythmic beat and magic trick. A brief structural film cut to the rhythm of the gap between the optical sound head and the image.