Off Center Stage

How can a film create spaces in which people become actors, and gestures start talking? How, too, does the documentary view of the world always transform what we see into a scene? In Scrapbook, footage shot in a home for disabled children during a workshop in the 1960s was viewed and commented on decades later by a former resident. Who does she see when she sees herself (again) in it? The play of reflective graphic surfaces and electronic sounds in Light Angle Sieve creates a paradoxical space that suggests and reduces depth, whilst being equally abstract and fictionally charged. Auditioning for Nathaniel depicts an encounter with the actor Nathaniel Jitahadi Taylor, who gained fame in the 1970s TV series Sanford and Son, among other things: a portrait that seems to evolve from mutual improvisation behind and in front of the camera. Fugue is a three-part composition that explores the relationship between theatrical gestures and real acts. Light reflexes alienate bodies, bodies displace texts, while the stage disappears in total visibility. Entirely in the tradition of ethnographic film, Scheinkraft not only takes us to the location of a centuries old ritual, but also circles the underlying parameters of the cinematic view of actions and those acting.