Dot Dot Dash Dot . . -- .

Lloyd Newson's The Cost of Living was screened at Dot Dot Dash Dot, presented by Artsadmin Youth Board, alongside three shorts from new filmmakers.

The Cost of Living (2005) is based on a stage production by Lloyd Newson and DVD8 Physical Theatre. The film combines various choreographic techniques, from slapstick, pantomime, ballet, human puppetry, to natural rhythms of sexual intercourse. Through them, it succeeds at creating a language of gestures that is more expressive than the verbal commentary offered by various characters. On the side of words, we have a crude one-sided interview with Phoebe, the legless dancer, by a man with a video camera whose lens gets intrusively close to the interviewee's body, questioning the lump on the back of his head, his stumps, his view of life. The answer is an [imagined] group dance in which other dancers imitate the legless leader's movements. This vision is inaccessible to the video cameraman who expected a mere freak show.  . . .

Mortel Transfert

+ The truth of a work of art lies in what it reveals of itself.
-- Even unconsciously.
+ The way of the detective or the way of the psychoanalyst.
-- Each might elicit a confession and arouse the expectation of punishment.
+ Is each story already a story of a crime?
-- Each story is a transgression.
+ The difference between the cop and the shrink is that to the former a crime is a fundamental given, an indisputable fact, whereas the latter thinks of it as a symptom, a superficial manifestation of something hidden.
-- And yet: the crime may take place only after the fact, in the wake of the detection of a crime.
+ Spoken like a true psychoanalyst.
-- A mere observer.
+ Even the margin is a side taken.
-- A work of art seems, at first approach, an object contained within its bounds: the margin, the frame, the first and the last cut. Setting aside the preparatory sketch, the rough draft, the work appears as an unambiguous object.
+ Like a crime, ready to submit to analysis.
-- Yes, like a crime.
+ Only, as does crime, the object slips between one's fingers as soon as one attempts to grasp it.
-- Or it is the object that takes hold of whoever tries to grasp it.
+ The detective proceeds by asking well-aimed questions. The psychoanalyst remains silent. . . .

Kevin Everson retrospective

The films shown at the Centre Pompidou retrospective are quite recent, made between 2002 and 2009. Everson entitled the first cycle (May 13) of his retrospective Broad Daylight and Other Times. The title captures his principal obsession in these films: to show what Zinn calls "history of the people", focusing on the singular experience, often in its relation to reported news (which is the first attempt at writing "authoritative" history). According to (2007, 8'30'', 16mm, B&W), the longest film in the series, relates a number of events through repeated TV footage juxtaposed with the news anchor's report. While the images remain the same, the narrative changes: a tragic drowning of a "Negro man" in Roanoke county, turns out to have been a murder; an accidental fire caused by the explosion of a kerosene tank in an apartment building, which resulted in the death of a "Negro woman", turns out to have been an arson perpetrated by two white males. The video excerpts from news footage alternate with the quotidian gesture of an old man (perhaps the filmmaker's father) going out onto his porch to pick up his daily. We never see him unfold the paper or read the news, but the repetition of the gesture juxtaposed with the replayed TV newscast eloquently comments on the place of the news in one's life, on the construction of history and on personal memory.  . . .