Cinema in Dialogue with the Written Word 

Cinema in Dialogue with the Written Word 

Lady Lazarus, Sandra Lahire, UK, 1991, 24’, Gli anni / The Years, Sara Fgaier, Italy, France, 2018, 20’, You and Me, Karsten Krause, Germany, 2010, 4’

Archival footage and a kaleidoscope of fragmented images enter into dialogue with memory, diary entries, poetry, extracts from prose texts and elements of autofiction. Film critic Veronika Zakonjšek discusses cinema as an intimate immersion into the subjective experience of a time, body and space with director Sara Fgaier and all-round artist Tomaž Grom.

When, in Sara Fgaier’s The Years, visual fragments from the Sardinian coast immerse us in memories of seascapes, home terraces, gardens and apartment rooms, they act as reflections of a fragmented and constantly changing memory. A memory trapped in a time and a place, in film and an image, which fractures, flows from one into another and, accompanied by a woman’s voice reading Annie Ernaux’s prose, repeatedly finds itself on the verge of disintegration. It is precisely words that reassemble every gesture, face, scene and space of archival footage, situating them and liberating them from the original context. They save the picture from fading into eternal oblivion and elevate intimate memories into a part of a larger, collective narrative. A narrative such as Lady Lazarus also turns out to be, breathing new life into Sylvia Plath’s poetry through the flow of symbols and Sandra Lahire’s experimental images. Words are woven into a picture and the poem transforms into a carousel of images that open up the poet’s psychic landscape before us. Intimacy, dialogue, longing, loss, violence, power and the body are just some of the topics that the poem opens up, before the thematic block of films is rounded off with the archival, personal-intimate You and Me, which recounts the story of the filmmaker’s parents’ marriage through a montage of fragmented images. Through the intertwinement of E.E. Cummings’ poetry and archival footage, the image of a woman walking towards her husband in different places, seasons and periods of her life over a span of forty years thus comes to life anew; freed from all the memory fragments that have dropped out of the picture.

Text by: Veronika Zakonjšek

Sandra Lahire was a central figure of the experimental feminist film movement that developed in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. She entered the world of independent film during her studies at St. Martin’s School of Art and, after obtaining an MA in Film and Environmental Media, presented her works at all the more important world festivals. In 2001, at the age of 51, she died after a lifelong battle with anorexia.

Sara Fgaier is an Italian-Tunisian film director and editor. After studying Film History and Criticism in Bologna, she trained under the film editor Walter Murch. She has directed several short films, with The Years winning the 2018 European Film Award for Best European Short Film. Weightless is her debut feature.

Karsten Krause studied Visual Communication at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. With his production house Fünferfilm, he has created an internationally recognised repertoire of unconventional documentaries, while his short film You and Me has been listed as one of the best German short films of the last decade.

Tomaž Grom is a double bass player, composer, sound designer, producer and artistic director of Zavod Sploh. As a musician, he worked on films by Špela Čadež, Boris Petković and Urška Djukić. In 2021, he made his first short film, Komaj čakam, da mine. For his debut feature, Don’t Think It’ll Ever Pass: 25. 4.–26.1., he received the 2023 Vesna Award for Best Film.

With the support of Italian Cultural Institute.