Carl Elsaesser is an experimental filmmaker whose work blends genres and materials to critically investigate the overarching presence of history without losing sight of individual experiences of human connection. The films in this partial retrospective move between melodrama and residue, offering evidence of cinema’s capacity to mourn, desire, and care.
The screening will be followed by an in-person Q&A with the filmmaker.
Programme:
Itinerary of Surfaces
2020 / USA / 8 min.
A gauzy, glowy play of corporeal associations shot at home, seeping through songs by Bjork and images of the moon from the 1998 Merlin television series.
Home When You Return
2021 / USA / 30 min.
“Linda Williams defines melodramas as one of three “body genres,” alongside horror and pornography, because it involuntarily moves audiences physically, in this case to tears. There is a temporality to this genre — of yearning for what might have been but never was; of lovers who attempt to reconcile but who miss their chance by minutes, moments; of characters cloaking themselves in melancholy when confronted with an unattainable future and an irrecoverable past.
Elsaesser’s film embraces such temporal friction by bringing the past to bear on the present. Throughout its 30-minute runtime, Home juxtaposes three women’s lives: Mary Patricia Wuest (Elsaesser’s deceased grandmother); filmmaker Joan Thurber; and Carrie, the protagonist of Thurber’s low-budget melodrama A Change of Scene (1957), played by Thurber herself. Home intersperses footage and sound from Thurber’s A Change of Scene with scenes of Wuest’s now unoccupied house. The camera lingers in Wuest’s living rooms or bedrooms, while audio from A Change of Scene chronicles breakups, domestic quarrels, and reconciliations. And Elsaesser does not just juxtapose these three women but also visually links them through a recurrent blur or smudge across their faces and names.” – Hannah Bonner, LA Review of Books
How to Run a Trotline
2024 / USA / 18 min.
“At once a reticent elegy to and a shy repudiation of fathers and homes, both original and adopted.” – Carl Elsaesser