Emily Wardill

Comments

O FANTASMA

As though the film maker ate Bataille and defecated it out in the shape of an animal which he then allowed to direct the film.

Tango of Yearning

After all the ‘scratch video’ that we have seen, and the use of existing footage as raw material by artists who wanted to use this collective consciousness to speak to our psychology and our experience of time, this film, which I came to late, manages to get the way that our lives weave in and out of fiction and feels like Stuart Hall's 'life blood of the imaginary'.

The Little Richard Story

Starts off with Little Richard impersonators in the back of a truck because Klein couldn't find the elusive singer. Klein manages to completely avoid the boring obsession with autobiography that most portraits of great artists adhere to (Who did he sleep with? What is that song really about?) and instead, by circling the absent genius, manages to show us that if Little Richard could have said it any other way than in the performance he would have.

Assemblages

Everything I have seen by this artist is shot through with philosophy as it hits our lives She manages to dispel the myth that the philosophical – which is a love of knowledge (not an interest or a pursuit, a love!) is hermetic, elitist and not of this world. Here, with a piece that shows the displacement that we have constructed between ourselves and non human nature by focussing on animism.

What About China?

Timeless rips in time by the filmmaker who thinks through moving image gently, respectfully and from her subjects.

Evil Selma # 27

Like a masterclass in how to tell a history through music as a document. Cokes makes a parallel between the switch from radio to television and the civil rights movement – that radio allowed us to form images in our own minds and hence become politically implicated in events we only hear about. All with Morrissey – 'The more you ignore me the closer I get' – re-appropriated for obvious reasons.

Brief Encounters

Muratova's careering through so-called plots reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of a party goer: he couldn't tell if she was crying or if the gin and tonic had reached her eyes and was spilling over. In Brief Encounters she plays the main part and there are many discussions between her and her lover (the folk singer Vladimir Vysotsky) that somehow manage to catch that magnetic force between them whilst the language remains scuttling and unhelpful. The film was shelved for 20 years before it was released and was eventually silenced and banished by government officials.

ABELHA NA CHUVA (A BEE IN THE RAIN)

Gentle, precious, pathetic fallacy, this film is like the way that fog descends on a landscape to make everything feel like theatre.

Privilege

Katrin Mundt at EMAF introduced me to this rare and powerful film, where women in their 50s and onwards speak about their lives, their politics, their hormones, their decisions.

Sidestepping the false idea that identity politics is somehow separate from other politics, Rainer reminds us this separation is another way of saying 'we don't have to listen to you'.

Fruit of thy Womb

A brave piece where the filmmaker confronts his own father for what he did to their family through careless entitlement. Subtle, brave and magnificent.

Further remarks

The numbers don't mean anything… but there was no way to sidestep them.