A fox sleeps under a birch tree as a hand edges into the frame and touches its flank, brief and tender. The animal stirs, stretches, then runs away into the woods. In How to Run a Trotline, touch becomes a way into what passes between bodies and what keeps resonating afterwards. A memorial to paternal and queer legacies in life and in art, Elsaesser builds the film through montage and correspondence. He draws on the sonic architecture of Michael Snow’s Presents (1981) and threads in William E. Jones’s Tearoom (2007), assembled from police surveillance footage of a public restroom in Mansfield, Ohio, used to charge and convict men for sex. Alongside Elsaesser’s own images, these fragments land as tribute and lineage, with the risks around desire still attached. A deeply personal, archival, and collaged film about bodies, misbehaving or otherwise.
