Ignorance Before Malice

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

The third part of the trilogy, MATTER OF CLARITY completes this particular cycle of discovery, and brings to resolution these themes, grounded in matter. "... rich tactile images of the natural world ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some particular spaces, inhabited awhile ago. Looking back into the Parisian courtyard, looking at the ladies at the villa, looking into the secrets of the chapel of the delinquents. Light sculpts space; shadow describes form.

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.

"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.

Sandra Davis' short film is an ode to a "reverence of moment and passion of place." Overlapping layers of voices (in French and English) accompany Davis' mesmerizing cinematographic technique, emphasizing light-infused qualities of the photographic frame. Reminiscence of her time spent in Paris as an au paire and her youth in Salinas join a chorus, mingling with an outdated record of French instructions and Catherine Denueve reading Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet." - Stela Jelincic