Sandra Davis

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.

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.

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.

An exploration of life in the female body.

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.

That Woman uses as source material the original Barbara Walters interview with Monica Lewinsky, which is intercut with a re-staging of the interview. Ms. Lewinsky is played by a women bearing a remarkable physical resemblance to the original, and Barbara Walters is played by George Kuchar. The make-up, costumes, set, lighting, and camera set-ups, are a facsimile of the original, albeit without the stunning high-production values displayed in the network original.

CREPESCULE POND AND CHAIR is a little elegy song, simultaneously celebrating a life and mourning a family's personal loss. Disabled by muscular dystrophy, Sandra Davis' brother used a wheelchair for most of his life. Despite the long, gradual degeneration of his physical condition, he lived with great spirit and heart, married, raised two children, volunteered for his church, and was still working at his profession and building a fish pond on his land, when he died suddenly of complications of MD at age 52. When the filmmaker herself was disabled in an auto accident, his attitude of practical adaptations to physical impairments was one that made it easier for her. In an irony of life, a little Christmas message from him arrived two days after his sudden death. This event impelled Davis to respond with a film. The chair was his mobility in life; the pond he created was his dream.

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.