The Plant

The Plant

2012 · 8 min

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

Directed by Mary Helena Clark

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Profit Motive and the Whispering WindProfit Motive and the Whispering Wind · 2008
Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind
★ 6.32008
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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 FrameThe Dragon Is the Frame · 2014
The Dragon Is the Frame
★ 6.02014
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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
Orpheus (Outtakes)
★ 4.52012
Movie
“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
PalmsPalms · 2015
Palms
2015
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Musical and mysterious, Mary Helena Clark’s Palms is a modular, sphinx-like film in four parts, comprised of two hands animating stillness, the repeated approach of headlights, a back-and-forth tennis match, and thoughts that emerge like objects.
ExhibitionExhibition · 2022
Exhibition
2022
Movie
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.
Delphi FallsDelphi Falls · 2017
Delphi Falls
2017
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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.
Neighboring AnimalsNeighboring Animals · 2024
Neighboring Animals
2024
Movie
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.
RecitalRecital · 2024
Recital
2024
Movie
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.
A Common SequenceA Common Sequence · 2023
A Common Sequence
2023
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.
Dreaming In The DarkDreaming In The Dark · 2018
Dreaming In The Dark
2018
Movie
For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?
After WritingAfter Writing · 2008
After Writing
2008
Movie
Scraps of text gathered from molding filmstrips and peeling chalkboards are photographed and intercut with pinhole shots from a schoolhouse.
The Sound of Running in My VoiceThe Sound of Running in My Voice · 2014
The Sound of Running in My Voice
2014
Movie
We ape naturalism.
While You Were SleepingWhile You Were Sleeping · 2010
While You Were Sleeping
2010
Movie
Experimental short about a man and some trees.
And the Sun FlowersAnd the Sun Flowers · 2008
And the Sun Flowers
2008
Movie
“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
By Foot-Candle LightBy Foot-Candle Light · 2011
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2011
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A walk through the proscenium wings. You close your eyes and suddenly it is dark.
Figure Minus FactFigure Minus Fact · 2020
Figure Minus Fact
2020
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In day-for-night blue and hunting camera night vision, darkness is replicated and punctured. Looking finds bodies in the dark, at the threshold of intimacy and trespass. Objects, surfaces, spaces become evidentiary and deceptive in a subjectless portrait of mourning.

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