Noonwaith Blues

Ominous 35mm cinegrams of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia print (1514) intercut, like cascading scythes, with live-action performances of a woman in a field, evoking repetitions that exist in harvest rituals, as well as in gestures of madness. Specters of familial anxieties creep into this loose take on the myth of Poludnica (noonwraith or Lady Midday), a Slavic harvest spirit that could cause madness in those who wandered the fields alone. Erwin Panofsky’s interpretation of Dürer’s engraving from his Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (1955), which he associated with fear, withdrawal, depression and madness servers as a starting point for this subtle portrayal of familial effects of transgenerational trauma. Shot on a saturated Super8 film, in this pastoral horror luscious landscape is a site of the woman’s idyllic childhood memories but ones that are disturbed by her ancestors’ experiences of wars and domestic violence. The interplay of the banal and the uncanny is highly suggestive as the film poses a question of whether the effects of trauma can reverberate down the generations through epigenetics? Thanks to Jerzy Kuc, Kerry Laitala, University of New Mexico, Experiments in Cinema Festival and the participants of the Cinegram Workshop, Albuquerque, 2015. Additional thanks to Caryn Cline, Cecelia Condit, Sally Cloninger, Jill Daniels, Jerry Duba, Tessa Garland, Marta Hawkins, Sean Kenny, Michelle Mellor, Scott Stark, Amanda Sterling, Patrick Tarrant and Lili White.Screenings:Images Festival, Toronto, ON, Canada.The Bomb Factory Artist’s Film Festival, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London. Winner of the Jury Award.Film Maudit, LA, California, USA.Edinburgh International Film Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland.another experiment by women film festival, online.ANALOGICA 10, online.Swedenborg Film Festival, London.Super 8 Film & DV Festival, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, online. Honourable Mention Award.Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Seattle, WA, USA, online.Antimatter [Media Art] Festival, Victoria, BC, Canada.58th Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, online.Experiments in Cinema, Albuquerque, The Pandemic Edition, NM, USA, online.Boston Short Film Festival, Boston, MA, USA.Courts d’un soir, Montréal, Canada.Visions in The Nunnery, Bow Arts, London, UK, gallery and online.CROSSROADS, San Francisco Cinematheque, San Francisco, CA, USA, online. Obskuur Ghent Film Festival, Ghent, Belgium.