How do archival photographs taken from aerial bombers reveal a way of looking that amounts to a self-portrait of the colonizer? In this episode, the comrades interview filmmaker and scholar Miranda Pennell about her new film Strange Object. We discuss the Dervish resistance in British Somaliland, tropes of the colonial encounter and colonial warfare, as well as her personal approach the ambiguity of photographs.
Strange Object will be available for streaming via Doc Alliance from July 12th onwards: https://dafilms.com/film.
"It’s never based on metaphor, but it’s more about metonymy," artist, filmmaker and educator Karen Yasinsky says about the relationship between found footage and animations in her film vera (2018). The suburban kitchen, a conventional domestic setting of the 1960s and 70s, is made strange by Yasinsky’s zany mode. Together we consider the creation of miniature worlds, the jittery motion of her hand-drawn lines and a trust between humans and animals based on touch rather than verbal communication.
Artist-scholar Jessica Bardsley talks to us about her film The Making and Unmaking of the Earth (2018), which can be considered an experiment in finding imagery for both personal and collective pain. Her fluid approach to understanding the self and the environment combines found footage of geological phenomena with personal histories. We discuss a black stone that appears in her film as the example of an object which fosters an open-ended attachment, pointing toward qualities of the self that remain elusive, or perhaps to nothing at all.
In this episode we talk to Noah Rosenberg about his new film a moment west (2020). Conceived while living in the remote corner of southwest Colorado, Noah's film engages the landscape of the western United States as a site of longing, environmental destruction and immense beauty. We consider his process of making in relation to ecology, painting as well as archival material. With terms like "moving-to" and "distortion," Noah describes how he grapples with overwhelming expanses both natural and virtual, while trying to forego preexisting representations and systems of knowledge.
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