by April Lin 林森
In Shapes You Take, nine films seek orientation in the world – sketching, animating, performing and speculating about the body and senses in motion.
In Morisha Moodley’s you are a thing which even angels desire to look into, the body of the filmmaker and the body of the film fuse into a cut-paste patchwork. As strips of matter, they are reworked and reassembled in a reflection on masculinity and physical-cinematic embodiment. Test Objects by Sam Drake further invites a merging between the moving image and the moving body. As the film unfolds, its own body performs re-orientations, medical examinations, re-stabilisations.
In Bad Yantra Cruel Mantra, Meghana Bisineer takes a bodily gesture from Claire Denis’s 1999 feature Beau Travail – unpacking, reworking and repeating it to find intimacy and violence in a single touch. The film’s close study of this one scene pre-empts a transcendental departure, finding mirrors in lichen, shadows, stains. Life Still by Lewis Teckkam conversely centres our attention, grounding it. We are asked to sit with stillness as fixed shots present a time-lapsed take on how filmic movement and embodiment are necessarily entwined, from the perspective of a wheelchair user.
In Issues with my other Half by Anna Vasof, screens and faces switch places, and a person jumps from a boat into water, leaving their legs behind. Poking fun at the uncanny possibilities of digital effects, Vasof twists and tickles everyday assumptions. Hands – in photographs, drawings, x-rays, and more – become holders and destroyers of memory, power, and history in Şirin Bahar Demirel’s Between Delicate and Violent, a complex, multilayered exploration of family archives.
Shamica Ruddock’s Something More Than Masquerade follows a boy in character as Pierrot Grenade reflecting on the dissident and liberatory origins of carnival. As bodies bounce to the rhythms of Notting Hill, erased legacies and hidden histories are thoughtfully pondered. Country Folk by Greta Alfaro follows the visceral and even surreal movements of feet squishing grapes, the pulsating gush of factory machines, the systems of ritual and repetition that motor these processes onward. And in Apocryphon, Jeremy Moss follows artist [M] Dudeck and their ritual of preparation that constitutes getting dressed, putting on makeup, and embodying a character. The onscreen body again dissolves into the cinematic body, merging transcendent zones of flesh and film.
