Horse Opera

Conventional narratives feel inauthentic because they want control, says Moyra Davey, a Canadian artist long associated with New York, who intentionally evokes the words of essayist Hilton Als in Horse Opera. In her visual diary, juxtaposing image with sound, the director gallops towards the fringes of cinematic avant-garde. In the visual layer, we glimpse life in the American provinces, often through a circular aperture. Mostly, it features horses grazing, but the camera also captures an inquisitive bear or birds at a feeder. The pandemic's unease doesn't affect nature. Occasionally, a woman recording herself on a phone appears in the frame—that's Moyra Davey. Via her voiceover, the artist leads us through the flickering labyrinth of New York's nightlife in the 1970s, accompanied by someone named Elle. It's a story of party euphoria and breathless dancing, a diary of youthful twilight, of the need for community and the shame of drug-induced crashes. Is Elle Moyra Davey's alter ego? Where do these two identities converge? Is it a celebration of the past or an antidote to the suspended state of the pandemic? In Horse Opera, the raw intimacy of Chantal Akerman's cinema meets Jean-Luc Godard's radical gesture, breaking away from film as classical narrative.