Sandra Davis

The specific colors and tones and rhythms of a place in the south of France. The dryness of gold, the rock of plateau, the cemetery of the sailors, the echoes of fishermen and artists, the memory of Paul Valery. And water everywhere.

My concept for “Evident / Evidence” was to create a kind of “peep-show”, which involved the construction of a mock Florida shack, into which the spectator is forced to “peep” through a burglar viewer eyepiece INTO the interior dark space. By ringing the doorbell, the viewer ignites a film and a video loop, which project onto a plexiglass screen in the center of the dark space. The loops include images of fragile Florida nature (swamps, birds) and a video intercut of the Hollywood film, the Wizard of Oz, with the Hill-Thomas senate hearings. I was interested here in the making of a woman’s body and experience into spectacle (parallel with the exploitation of the natural environment in Florida) and the positing of evil and blame on her. The specific complications and contrasts of racial and cultural identity embedded in these issues was further developed by the intercutting of the Hollywood film.

Originally a text in fragments, more or less biographical, of different characters. Crossed stories, mixed times, memories and inventions. Coming from the voices encountered. They look like text like sisters. They are the voices of memory, the shadows cast by the characters, the voices of girls, the voices of indecision and evocation. We begin with this work: to read, to record (in analog, it takes breath). Here comes a place, a place found: the foliage of a vine in the South, crossed by the wind Mistral: a landscape. Where are we? Where the boy dies, would we see what he sees? Where was the child playing in the neighborhood? At the heart of the narrative, at the heart of the written word? That would happen. Harvesting images, shifting gears, Multiplying the generations with the listening of the voices, even in memory sometimes.

An exploration of life in the female body.

The stories of three women intertwine in voiceover to Sandra Davis' collage of contradictory images: a Florida swamp, mermaids, the majestic medieval architecture of Europe, Anita Hill before Congress and abstract color and light, interspersed with bits of 1950s educational films. These are shocking testimonies about the burden of female identity: illegal abortions performed in the '50s without anesthesia; the dynamics of the relationship between husbands and wives; the inability to participate in the enjoyment of sex. A mixture of documentary and narrative filmmaking, Davis' powerful film is a personal female journey to deconstruct the burden of inherited identity. - Stela Jelincic

Another ode - a little story without a narrative. A reverie for a moment in time, and a passion of place. Facing time and echoes of disappearance. Audio and visual text include French and English; there are no "subtitles" - each language use is presented as an independent element of the sound/image collage, and all text meaning is fully represented in each language.

"Davis's earlier explorations of the body and sensuality come to fruition in this, her latest film. Through rigorous cross-cutting and use of extreme close-ups, manmade and natural manifestations of architecture merge with the physical body into palpable delineations of form and function." – San Francisco Cinematheque program notes

The colors and breezes of the countryside and house in Normandy. The blue crockery, the yellow lichen, and where the key in the monastery kitchen leads.