Recital

Recital

2024 · 9 min

What are we looking at? We can perhaps discern from the greyscale fuzz, the varying degrees of white patches, fanning out from a point in shapes hard to parse, that this is an ultrasound display. But what are we trying to see in the scan? There is no baby or foetal development, no heart, no kidney, no liver, no needle to pierce through the night like a ship. But it moves in time with a voiceover. A mouth, surely? Yes. We are, quite literally, mechanically, watching someone speak.

Directed by Mary Helena Clark

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Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind · 2008

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A visual essay about the progressive tradition of the United States as seen through grave markers and monuments.

The Dragon Is the Frame

The Dragon Is the Frame · 2014

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Diaristic but also generously expansive, Mary-Helena Clark's disarmingly raw and beautiful The Dragon is the Frame proceeds like an experimental detective film, exploring the enigma of depression in its subtle interplay between presence and absence.

Orpheus (Outtakes)

Orpheus (Outtakes) · 2012

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“Using footage from Cocteau’s Orphée, Clark optically prints an interstitial space where the ghosts of cinema lurk beyond and within the frames.” – Andrea Picard

Delphi Falls

Delphi Falls · 2017

By testing the limits of identification with the camera’s point of view, Delphi Falls cycles through multiple subjectivities. The film misuses more traditional narrative conventions - the suggestion of a story, the anchoring of actors as protagonists - to have the viewer constantly questioning who or what they are, and where they are located in the film’s world.

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Exhibition

Exhibition · 2022

Pivoting between two stories of women and their relationships with objects—a Swedish woman’s marriage to the Berlin Wall, and a suffragette’s hatcheting of Velásquez’s The Toilet of Venus—Mary Helena Clark’s Exhibition is a maze-like tour through images and artifacts, a dense cryptography of the forms and objects that hold us in.

Neighboring Animals

Neighboring Animals · 2024

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The title piece is a two-channel video centered on the mouth – as a tool to bite and chew, as an instrument of speech, and as a site of disgust and desire. It incorporates footage of animal dentistry, bite mark analysis, and a reliquary containing the tooth of Mary Magdalene. Projected alongside is a text collaging language from psychological studies on disgust, philosophical inquiries on human nature and animality, and poetry.

The Plant

The Plant · 2012

A spy film, built on the bad geometry of point-of-view shots.

After Writing

After Writing · 2008

Scraps of text gathered from molding filmstrips and peeling chalkboards are photographed and intercut with pinhole shots from a schoolhouse.

A Common Sequence

A Common Sequence · 2023

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MovieDocumentary

An interconnected look at tradition, colonialism, property, faith, and science, as seen through labor practices that link an endangered salamander, mass-produced apples, and the evolving fields of genomics and machine learning.

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The Sound of Running in My Voice · 2014

The Sound of Running in My Voice

We ape naturalism.

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And the Sun Flowers · 2008

And the Sun Flowers

“Henry James had his figure in the carpet, Da Vinci found faces on the wall. Within this Baltimore wallpaper: a floral forest of hidden depth and concealment, the hues and fragrance of another era. Surface decoration holds permeable planes, inner passages. There emerges a hypnotic empyrean flower, a solar fossil a speaking anemone, of paper, of human muscle, of unknown origin, delivering an unreasonable message of rare tranquility.” – Mark McElhatten

While You Were Sleeping

While You Were Sleeping · 2010

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Experimental short about a man and some trees.

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A walk through the proscenium wings. You close your eyes and suddenly it is dark.

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The Glass Note · 2018

In this elliptical audiovisual diary, cinema’s extrasensory capacity is given surprising form. Here, what we see (the human throat, Gothic statuary, digitally generated furniture) often contradicts what we hear (birdsong, tightly wound rope, lithophonic stones), but the combined effect speaks to a utopian and universal ideal of filmic language.

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