Synopsis

Ominous 35mm cinegrams of Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 Melencolia print are intercut, like cascading scythes, with saturated super-8 film of a woman in a fresh-cut farm field, evoking repetitions that exist in harvest rituals, as well as in gestures of madness. Specters of familial anxieties creep into this loose take on the myth of Poludnica (noonwraith or Lady Midday), a Slavic harvest spirit that could cause madness in those who wandered the fields alone. The starting point for this subtle portrayal of the familial effects of transgenerational trauma is Erwin Panofsky’s Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (1955) in which he associates Dürer’s engravings with fear, withdrawal, depression and madness.

In this pastoral horror, luscious landscape serves as the site of a woman’s idyllic childhood memories but ones that are disturbed by her ancestors’ experiences of wars and domestic violence. The interplay of the banal and the uncanny is highly suggestive as the film poses a question of whether the effects of trauma can reverberate down the generations through epigenetics?

 

Filmmaker Details

Kamila Kuc is a multimedia artist and writer whose work explores the transformative potential of apparatuses, memories and archives in the creation of societal myths and narratives. Of particular interest to her practice are stories that subvert dominant narratives and versions of history, especially those relating to post-Soviet identities. In her projects she explores complex notions of agency, belonging, identity, memory, representation and cultural heritage.

Her films have screened in venues and at film festivals nationally and internationally: Whitechapel Gallery, British Film Institute, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Anthology Film Archives New York, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Experiments in Cinema, Antimatter [Media Art], Montreal Underground Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. She is the recipient of many international grants, namely Arts and Humanities Research Council, Arts Council of England (UK), New Mexico Arts, New Mexico Humanities Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA). She is also the author and editor of numerous books and articles on experimental media, including Visions of Avant-Garde Film (Indiana University Press) and the co-founder, with Sam Jury, of Disasters of Peace - a creative initiative that encompasses research, writing, making and curating. Her work is held in various online repositories and platforms, namely artinCINEMA archives, sofy.tv, Vimeo on Demand, and Ann Arbor District Library Michigan.