2018 Fragments of a filmmaker’s work: Sandra Davis, Vivian Ostrovsky, Martine Rousset Fragments of a filmmaker’s work: Sandra Davis, Vivian Ostrovsky, Martine Rousset
Many of my works center around the body as the site of imagistic and dynamic foundations that structure human impulses, feelings and thoughts. There is an emphasis on experience as mitigated by living in a female body. Beyond the body itself, images of natural landscape and architecture recur. The films, as time-based, rhythmic forms, are meant to be understood through the body and senses, as well as the conceptual mind. Editing tactics contrast fluid imagery and lyrical tempos with jagged, metric rhythms. Contradictory meaning can emerge and traditionally understood meaning can collapse in the parallel streams of images, which pulsate together until one of them dominates, and then collapses and reforms. The films utilize a variety of cinematographic techniques which emphasize the light-infused and textural qualities of the photographic material and process.
I am rooted in the history of feminism, from Simone de Beauvoir – who stated that one is not born a woman, one becomes one, suggesting both identity and gender are constructed – to artists such as filmmaker Gunvor Nelson, whose works reflect women’s innermost psychological and bodily experience.
In the history of the American experimental, or personal film (films made by artists, as unique art works, not as commercial productions), a strain of filmmaking developed that prioritized the act of seeing with the camera eye, as direct equivalent to the eye of the artist. One thinks of Marie Menken and Stan Brakhage as such seminal makers. Their work was a strong influence on me. After initial films such as Maternal Filigree, which strives in its silent flow of imagery to evoke echoes of sexuality, birth and maternity, I have concentrated on sound films, with audio tracks woven together with the image and in collision with it. One possibility which opened to me in sound was not only the creation of denser poetic relationships, but a key to creating works which emphasize and evoke both a uniquely personal and a collective experience.
16mm film, traveling at 24 frames per second, sears the eye and brain with meaning that must be synthesized by the viewer’s consciousness into a whole by the end of the viewing – and it is not uncommon for persons to report that they “saw” a film quite differently in repeated, successive viewings. Throughout my career, installation and wall pieces created using elements, images, and thematics from a film as source, have allowed me to rework certain imagery, re-contextualize it (as in a collage process) and to isolate and develop certain of the multiple strains that one film might evoke.
In my film A Preponderance of Evidence, I explored love, power, sexuality and violence through a non-narrative mixture of images of nature, stained glass windows from European cathedrals, and footage from two films made in the fifties: one produced by a mental health organization, attempting to describe why boys become delinquent, the other a “how-to” film for a high-school audience, describing how to get a date for the prom. I layered this with recordings of three women reflecting on their experiences with sexuality, relationships, illegal abortions, adolescence as a Jew in revolutionary Russia and in the Protestant US Midwest. Their anecdotes reveal issues that are at once personal and intimate, yet indicative of societal issues of compassion and power.
It is possible to see two strains in my film work – one is a longer, dense work that attempts to synthesize diverse audio, image, and thematic material into a coherent sound/image work. The other is a shorter form, an ode – a kind of little story without a narrative. Ode in the French sense of a reverie for a moment in time, and, for me, a passion of place. A short form made in awe, feeling presence through the work and facing time and disappearance of being. Images of “place” are important to me: landscape, earth and soil (often in close up and extreme close up); and of water, and the specificities of those within season. In composing a film, I treat the various lines of sound and image as lines of “voice” in a chorale work, or as in a polyphonic musical work.
Sandra Davis
This is not a director’s statement since I don’t “direct” my films. I shoot everyday scenes with my Super-8 camera, log them, let them marinate for a while and later assemble certain scenes thematically – never chronologically. The films are a kind of journal, often composed of travel notes since I tend to move around a lot.
I started with photography, very young. My mother being a photographer, I looked into her Rolleiflex and liked it. I tried to take my own photos, without much success but with perseverance. A few years later, someone offered me a camera and, for a long time, I made home movies in 8mm then in Super 8. It was only much later that I really became active in the field of cinema. I’ve always loved the cinema; my mother took me often. I saw quite a few films without ever thinking of making one. I began on the other side, by organizing women’s film festivals in the seventies.
I felt there was something wrong with the fact that films made by women weren’t being distributed. When we organized the second Women’s Film Festival in Paris, we found tons of films that didn’t have a distributor and had no chance of being seen although they were, on the whole, very good. I saw an opportunity to act; so I organized festivals, and then quite naturally moved into distribution because, once the festival was over, women filmmakers had nowhere to leave their prints so that they could be shown.
I started distributing films by and about women, bringing them to women’s film festivals all over Europe in an old Renault station wagon. There were also sidebars for women’s film in many regular film festivals then, and I think there was a need for that. I liked “experimental” cinema, I found a unique kind of freedom in it. But “experimental” isn’t such a good name: I would prefer something like non-narrative. It’s a more unconventional way of expressing oneself. I found in it an element of surprise which I didn’t see in the commercial mainstream.
I met some experimental filmmakers and, after a while, Martine Rousset encouraged me to splice my images together. She showed me how. We were in Provence, in the bathroom of a rural holiday cottage, a dark room dug into the rock face. We took scissors, glue, and a splicer, and that was my initiation. Right away I started working on image and sound. I’ve never made silent films: I try to play with sound. My films are shown in festivals, true enough, but they’re made for everybody.
I started editing in Super 8. The next step was to edit everything in 16mm. That was the way I worked: I edited 80% of the images myself in Super 8, then blew it all up to 16mm and polished the edit in 16. Now I’ve moved onto digital editing because it doesn’t make sense to continue with the old methods. I noticed in several festivals that the projectionists no longer knew how to project 16mm film. You have to take that into account. I regret it deeply because I liked the 16mm format a lot. Super 8 is very expensive and there are very few places left that process it. Video images in comparison to Super 8 still seem flat and pasteurised and lacking a certain texture. Super 8 is certainly not high-def. It’s soft and fuzzy and it’s nice. I still like it.
Vivian Ostrovsky
Cinema, the photochemical imprint, is not a code. It has to do with memory: what is a footprint in the sand? Somebody passed that way and is no longer there. What do we mean by the image-imprint? A trace; an image of absence and presence. Cinema is a tool and an art of the physics of time, twenty-four images per second. Not a question of fetishism, ever. What is at stake is simply experimentations with languages and materials. An art of the material aspects of time. Before saying experimental. Video is not that. You have to choose your tools depending on what you’re doing and find wild and poor pathways, like brushes for a particular canvas, and you always find them in the elementary. If you want to make a rich piece of work, then you have to compromise to the neck and don’t come crying afterwards.
The term “experimental cinema” isn’t suitable and never has been. It has no meaning: every art experiments, otherwise it is not an art. What comes closer would be something like an arte povera of film. It’s a notion that lays things down and opens things up more clearly.
From my point of view, the print-like nature of a chemical image makes it an inscriptive (which is word that doesn’t exist but I don’t care) or scriptural image. A film is a written object, especially in 16mm, which has the stability of a page. I didn’t say a text, did I, but a written object. Something that is to be read in another language – how can you hear it? When photochemical film disappears, writing disappears too, the body disappears, memory disappears, the unconscious disappears. What remains? There’s something genocidal about it.
I also liked “elementary” images right away. Not wanting to smooth out, be sophisticated, attempt to take control of things. I’ve always desired elementary images because that kind of elementary could capture things better than by dominating a frame, etc. That sort of thing never interested me – constructing a frame, mastering the angle. What I was interested in was the vision. Vision is what happens between you, your camera, and the direction where you’re looking for something.
When there is a film with a text, it’s because there’s a meeting between a landscape and a text. Not a landscape illustrating a text or a text illustrating a landscape, but a link of similarity, as if the roots of the text were in this landscape, or the roots of the landscape were in the text. Cinema can try to see what you mean when you say: “it’s there”. What is the shared root? Does the landscape precede this text? Does the text exist because such a landscape exists in the world? How do they meet up, how does the text pass into the landscape, and how does the landscape pass into the text? All that’s very fragile; it’s not there to impose certainties or analyses.
I don’t recognize the images that I film right away. I generally film the same thing ten or fifteen times: I walk about, I come back, until something has been exhausted. Then I develop the film, and if I can do it myself, that’s fine: in a lab, developing is the part I prefer. Then I look at it and say: “That’s shit, there’s nothing there.” There never is anything. Then I wait. You can wait two days, ten days or ten years, and at the end of two days, ten days or ten years, you’ve forgotten and you look at it again and you say: “Ah, there it is!” It’s there, you recognize it. There was that first revelation in the technical, chemical gesture where you see the image being formed, and then there is the revelation which must take place within you of recognizing this image and what it has to say to you. I have the feeling that that takes place behind my back. It’s something unconscious, the time of a memorial trajectory. Walter Benjamin talks about it when he says that film introduces within the image the “visual unconscious”. That’s the place where it works out within me. And that’s why it takes me time to recognize images. Then, when I’ve recognized them, I move on to the editing and everything’s fine.
I sort, put into order, already assembling things, I choose shots with the result that, afterwards, in the editing, it’s more about what happens between the image and the sound and attempting to make the whole thing breathe. Bits of alchemy take place, with always the extremely precise feeling, keen I would say, that the structure is right, or not. Conscious of all the work done, I move ahead step by step at the machine’s rhythm. It’s not all that complicated. Just like I’m not obsessed by framing when I film, I am not mesmerized by problems of construction or rhythm… I’m just on the lookout, but I think that the coherence of my films is not due to the editing.
There is the displacement of the link between image and sound, which can go from a radical disconnection to vague navigations, including things that are mutual and reciprocal – image and sound are always reciprocal, one might say – but the initial displacement is that of the image towards its print-like nature. When the image is freed from its function as representation, narration, it becomes an image-passage, a passage of the Real. Passages are life, history, other people, the wind in the trees, roots that cling to the earth...
Martine Rousset
Debates led by Federico Rossin.
In the presence of Sandra Davis, Vivian Ostrovsky and Martine Rousset.