Jennifer Reeves – short films 2

Chronic is an experimental diary of growing up, a fear-filled story about searching for identity in a world of violence. This film is a sort of introduction to The Time We Killed. Rape, pregnancy, disappointment in love, the constant proximity of a potential suicide, inner rebellion and anxiety related to the powerlessness of the female body will drive Gretchen to a psychiatric hospital. There, and then in the big city she would live, fascinated with various versions of femininity, she will find new friends and lovers.

A bloody adaptation of a poem by William Carlos Williams, American modernist and imagist. For Williams, poetry was a field, a pure surface where poetic image is placed with lucidity and precise detail. In a transgressive style, Reeves responds to questions he asked in the poem.

Extraordinary colours and corroding images in one, fear of speed and fascination with the elusiveness of change. Shame and pleasure. Abstract experiments by Jennifer Reeves can be interpreted by hints in their titles. The director creates a disturbing space of images and sounds, combining shapes, recurring voices and deformed musical themes into astonishing configurations.

A collage of fragments of an emotional landscape, where TV programmes overlap with chats in bars and recollections of a rape mixed with unnamed fantasies. An attempt to reconstruct events which keep falling apart. This is not the first time when complexity and vagueness has triumphed in Jennifer Reeves' films.

Development of issues touched on in Light Work I. A film screened in double projection, often as a live film and sound performance, illustrated by the experimental electronic music pulsating with variable rhythms, composed by Anthony Burr. The subject is still the disturbing imperfection of the archaic 20^th century technology confronted with organic forms, worlds of genetic mutations on one hand, and the digital nature of the 21^st century on the other.

 Agnieszka Szeffel

A film made in the summer of 1997 at an experimental film farm in Ontario, owned by the director Philip Hoffman. We Are Going Home is a homage to his untimely deceased partner, director and author Marian McMahon. This is a recording of an unrecognized desire, overlapping poetic visions experienced by three women. Manual processing of the 16 mm film transformed the real images of the country into an internal landscape.