In ‘Walking with Nandita’, an essay for documenta 14 composed of photographs and fragments of text, Canadian artist Moyra Davey traces the wandering trajectory of her thought as she travels from New York City to Kolkata. Commissioned on the theme of “language or hunger”, Davey’s essay begins with writers and their appetites – Virginia Woolf’s distaste for soup in A Room of One’s Own (1929); Chantal Akerman devouring of a bag full of sugar as she writes her lover a letter in Je Tu Il Elle (1975).
As Davey recalls the letters of 19th-century British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, the essay diverts to an earlier scene: a visit to the South Park Street Cemetery in Kolkata, and the thread of connection that led Davey to Cameron. ‘Walking with Nandita’ follows this thread – moving between Davey’s account of her travels in India alongside artist Nandita Raman, and her reflections on Cameron’s colonial life and photographic practice. While travelling, Davey’s fleeting desires to film are interrupted; “but I keep on walking”, she writes. For Davey, filming these images feels not only intrusive, but mnemonically ineffectual: a way of forgetting. Instead, she takes digital photographs of empty spaces and inanimate objects, bodies captured at a distance. Yet, the form of the essay registers these moments of potential detour and diversion, recording the peripatetic movement of her thinking. The final fragment, ‘New York’, looks back at this essayistic wandering, noting its diversion from the opening: the appetites of Virginia Woolf and Chantal Akerman. By way of explanation, Davey concludes, “but appetites get displaced. In my desire for a narrative I followed a thread that began in the Kolkata cemetery, I came upon an archive, and cupidity drove me to access its contents so that I could make images, take away something, fuel a story.”1 Four images follow, visualising Davey’s trajectory: a sunrise on the riverbanks of Varanasi; two of Nandita Raman’s photographs of the Kolkata cemetery; a women’s bathroom in The New York Public Library. In À la Francesca Woodman (Nandita Raman, 2016), we see the titular Nandita in front of the cemetery’s sepulchral monuments, running as if to exit the frame. Her blurred movement evades the fixity of her own photographic gaze, pointing beyond the limits of the frame. ‘Walking with Nandita’ ends not with a conclusion, but with a movement outward: a visual expansion of Davey’s essayistic wandering.
This mode of wandering cuts across Moyra Davey’s work in photography, film, and writing. Born in Toronto in 1958, and based in New York City, Davey has increasingly turned to the moving image, beginning with Fifty Minutes (2006). Shot over three years, and spanning 50 minutes (the standard length of a psychoanalytic session), the film unravels as a series of vignettes set within the domestic interiors of the artist’s apartment. On-camera or through voice-over, Davey reflects upon the practice of reading, her experience with psychoanalysis, and the anxiety of a well-stocked fridge. A self-professed work of ‘autofiction’ (a form of fictionalised autobiography), Fifty Minutes introduces many of the features that have come to define Davey’s approach to filmmaking: the self-reflexive voice-over; the fervent practice of literary and filmic citation; the attunement to the domestic everyday; the mise-en-scène of her New York apartment. These features, recurrent and re-imagined across her moving image works (six to date), forge a connection with a distinctive mode of filmmaking labelled ‘the essay film’.
Often defined by reference to Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), the essay film lies somewhere in between documentary, experimental cinema, and fiction. Characterised by a reflexive negotiation of the relationship between the self and the world, the personal and the public, the essay film gives visual form to a process of thinking typically reserved for the verbal register. By combining word, image, and sound, the essay film creates new forms of expression. In The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker, Timothy Corrigan situates the distinctiveness of this mode of filmmaking within its literary heritage. In the essayistic, Corrigan argues, we find the, “figure of the self or subjectivity thinking in and through a public domain in all its historical, social, and cultural particulars. Essayistic expression (as writing, as film, or as any other representational mode) thus demands both loss of self and the rethinking and remaking of the self.”2 With voice-overs that move in and out of first-person narration, reflecting aloud on the construction and performance of the film’s (fictionalised) ‘I’, Davey’s essay films explicitly stage their relation to this literary tradition. One of her most recent films, Notes on Blue (2015), takes Derek Jarman’s essay film Blue (1993) as its starting point, interweaving her own experience of partial blindness with passages from Jorge Luis Borges, Julia Kristeva, and Sylvia Plath. While situating Davey within the tradition of the essay film, however, I want to take my own diversion in order to ask: what form does her thinking take? How does Davey’s mode of wandering in her films – as thought and as activity – articulate a feminine aesthetic? How can we consider Notes on Blue, Les Goddesses (2011) and Hemlock Forest (2016) in relation to what we might call ‘the feminist essay film’?
a flâneuse of the interior
What I refer to as Davey’s mode of wandering recalls the ambulatory drift of Baudelairian flânerie, through the attention that it pays to the everyday. Attuned to detail and contingency, we follow our curiosity through the city – the slow rhythm of walking punctuated by stops and starts; turns, detours, and diversions. Davey’s essay films transfer these patterns and rhythms of flânerie to the interior: the space of thought and the space of the home. In an interview with The New Yorker, Davey describes herself as a “flâneuse who never leaves her apartment”.3 The (im)possibility of the flâneuse in the city – whether her amplified visibility allows this mode of wandering – is contested terrain, most recently reignited by Lauren Elkin in Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London. Elkin argues that we cannot simply reduce the flâneuse to its masculine concept (a ‘female flâneur’); instead, we must think the concept anew from the basis of women’s experiences in and of the city. While a flânerie of the interior diverges in important ways from the flâneuse of the city, Elkin’s description of Agnès Varda’s ‘cinematic flânerie’ resonates with Davey’s approach: “her curiosity guides her; she follows whatever clues are laid down in front of her, so that her films, especially the documentaries, are often collections of observations and serendipitous encounters.”4 The coincidental resemblances between philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughters, nicknamed ‘the goddesses’, and Davey’s own sisters form the backdrop of her 2011 film, Les Goddesses. Composed as a series of chapters, each circling around a different yet interconnected idea, the film follows the layered, interruptive trajectories of her thinking – from Wollstonecraft to her photographic practice, Goethe’s Italian diaries to her diagnosis with MS. Black-and-white photographs from the eighties of the teenage Davey sisters are intercut with shots that linger on the spaces of the apartment, or the view from its windows.
Les Goddesses largely avoids frontal, symmetrical composition; instead, we see the interior of the apartment from oblique angles, the contours of the space exposed: doors, corridors, sharp corners. We try to orient ourselves within Davey’s apartment: the bedroom here, the living room there. Yet, the movement of the camera, the fragmentary editing, and the shifts from close-up to partial views destabilise our sense of the space. Throughout the film, we glimpse the artist passing through different rooms, a peripatetic wandering across frames. Headphones in, tape recorder in hand, Davey paces as she repeats the recorded voice-over in flat intonation. When the ambient sound fades to a murmur, we hear the slight temporal lag between Davey’s original recorded voice, and its embodied repetition. Like her constant movement in space, the temporal layering of Davey’s voice-over evades fixity and exposure. This evasion is brought into sharp relief by the film’s juxtaposition of the artist’s wandering, and the still photographs of the young Davey sisters. With matching white T-shirts and androgynous haircuts, they look directly at the spectator; I am moved by the force of their collective stare.
In contrast, the artist positions herself incidentally within the frame: her gaze directed elsewhere, her back towards the camera, her face fragmented or obscured in its distance from the lens. She stumbles over her words. In Les Goddesses, Davey’s mode of wandering seems to be a strategy of navigation: between this act of self-exposure, and what she calls in the film, her “biographical reticence”.
Notes on Blue (2015)
“the shimmering, flickering grain of blue”
Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009), Eugenie Brinkema’s article on Blue Is The Warmest Colour, Sander Hölsgens’s Blue Bluer (2017): the colour blue seems to invite a fragmentary form. Though less a phenomenology of colour, Davey’s Notes on Blue is no exception. Commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and emerging out of Davey’s research within the archives of Derek Jarman, Notes on Blue begins with the artist standing at the kitchen counter. We watch as she silently slips off her black lace bra through the arm of her T-shirt, and walks off-frame. Her footsteps resonate through the space. Cut to a lingering close-up at the boundaries of an entryway, the side of the doorframe bifurcating the view of the adjoined rooms. The grain of the earlier scene is now replaced by the clarity of high-definition. A pool of light collects in a yellowed gauze curtain. She wanders across the frame, out-of-focus; the proximity of the camera allows only a glimpse of her side profile. The sound of breathing intermingles with the indiscernible whisper of Davey’s recorded voice. “I began with a first note to myself. I made a list, but I’ll start in the middle,” she begins. Cut to a close-up of her notebook: the camera adjusts to focus on a hand-written list of references and citations, from Bluets to Sylvia Plath. As she paces in and out of the frame, she speaks about Blue Ruin, a work she abandoned the year before she went blind in one eye. We hear the faint sound of her recorded voice. Emanating from her headphones, it creates an echoic effect – a doubled voice. The film cuts back to the kitchen. We watch as Davey takes a blue bottle of gin from the fridge, and pours a glass.
The indirect and incidental become grounds for orientation: for both Davey and her spectator, it is the thread we follow
Notes on Blue is oriented around Jarman – “the shimmering, flickering grain of blue” that connects his film to Davey’s own diminished visual perception. The film pivots on this question of orientation, or in Davey’s terms “the disorientation of sightlessness”. Here, the shifting movement of light and shadow amplifies the disorienting effect of the camera’s oblique angles, its focus on the apartment’s edges and contours. Walking through streams of light and pools of shadow, Davey’s wandering moves between visibility and partial obscurity, exposure and evasion. Yet, in watching and re-watching the film, I am struck most by the way the film draws attention to the ways in which we orient ourselves: not simply towards the film, but towards others, spaces, texts and images. Davey’s mode of wandering lays bare the relational condition of her process of thinking: what we choose to read or watch always re-orients us, leading us to new lines of connection or digression. Her peripatetic movement throughout the apartment traces these lines bodily. Notes on Blue is far from a tightly-woven argumentative essay. As I watch the film, the movement and openness of Davey’s essayistic form begins to prompt my own wandering. The recurrent shot from Davey’s apartment window – a Blueskin tarp covering the building next door – immediately recalls an image from Bluets that I hadn’t realised I still remembered.
18. A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck. Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind.5
Hemlock Forest (2016)
“derailed by Chantal Akerman”
Hemlock Forest begins and circles around a specific image: the subway scene in Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1977). Her voice layered over the ambient drone of the train, Davey describes the anxiety she feels in her desire to recreate the scene. Later in the film, in repeated intervals, Davey’s own footage along ‘line 1’ punctuates her flânerie of the interior. Hemlock Forest revisits and reflects on Les Goddesses, turning toward the Davey sisters now through the prism of motherhood and loss. Having watched the two films back-to-back over two days in April, I begin Hemlock Forest with a sense of the familiar. I recognise the lamp in the corner, the curtain in the living room window. The black-and-white photographs of the teenage Davey sisters, once filling the frame in Les Goddesses, are now filmed as material objects: pasted on the wall, or flicked through in close-up. The self-reflexivity of Hemlock Forest extends across the film, interrogating its own construction to a greater degree than her previous work. In one scene, we see Davey sprawled on her bed with her laptop and recording equipment (now an iPhone). She begins to recite into the mic, reading from the screen. She stumbles on the words – and stops. The words repeat, this time as voice-over, now dislocated from the image. Cut to an image of Akerman in Je Tu Il Elle (1975): horizontal on a mattress, hand-written pages lining the surrounding floor.
”I am now officially derailed by Chantal Akerman,” Davey announces, responding to news of Akerman’s death. She shifts to direct address, speaking of/to Akerman with rising intensity: “I spend hours watching you online”; “I could listen to you forever.” Davey’s use of the “you” addresses us dialogically, yet indirectly. Like in Les Goddesses and Notes on Blue, the indirect and incidental become grounds for orientation: for both Davey and her spectator, it is the thread we follow.
With its tendency towards self-reflexive questioning and dialogic relation with the spectator, the essay film is perhaps “the most feminist of filmmaking modes”6, Anne Eakin Moss polemically proposes. The recent screening of Babette Mangolte’s The Camera: Je (1977) at the 2017 Essay Film Festival in London, introduced by Laura Mulvey, points to the productive crossovers, yet slipperiness of definition between feminist filmmaking and the essay film. While Akerman’s News from Home and La Chambre (1972), as well as Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), are important reference-points in contemporary essay filmmaking, we can also situate them within a different lineage: the ‘feminist essay film’. Davey’s recurrent engagement with Akerman’s work explicitly calls attention to this lineage. By expressing a mode of wandering, a flânerie through thought and interior space, Moyra Davey’s essay films enable a way of thinking about the aesthetic possibilities of this mode of filmmaking. Les Goddesses, Notes on Blue, and Hemlock Forest expose how we orient ourselves around and towards others, spaces, texts, and images, articulating a feminist ethics of ‘being–with’ that leaves space for our own trajectory. To paraphrase Davey, we are always, “Walking with –.”
Hannah Paveck is a PhD Candidate in Film Studies at King’s College London. Her doctoral project draws on the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy to examine sound and listening in contemporary global art cinema.
1. Moyra Davey, ‘Walking with Nandita’, South as a state of mind 8:3, 2017, (Online) 2. Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (New York: Oxford University Press: 2011), p17. 3. Jessica Weisberg, ‘Can Self-Exposure Be Private?’ The New Yorker, May 2012, (Online). 4. Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London. (London: Chatto and Windus, 2016), p228. 5. Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Seattle: Wave Books, 2009). 6. Anne Eakin Moss, ‘A Woman With A Movie Camera: Chantal Akerman’s Essay Films’, in The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, ed. Elizabeth Papazian and Caroline Eades (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2016), p.167
