Thursday, October 2, 2014

10/8/14 Mary Helena Clark


The Sound of Running in my Voice
Films by Mary Helena Clark
TRT: 60 minutes

After Writing, Clark, 2008
3 min., 16mm
Scraps of text gathered from molding filmstrips and peeling chalkboards are photographed and intercut with pinhole shots from a schoolhouse.

Orpheus (outtakes), Clark, 2014
6 min., 16mm
"Using footage from Cocteau's Orphée, Mary Helena Clark optically prints an interstitial space where the ghosts of cinema lurk beyond and within the frames." - Andrea Picard


The Sound of Running in My Voice, Clark, 2014
8 min., Digital video
We ape naturalism. (Overheard)

And the sun flowers, 2008
5 min., digital video

By foot-candle light, 2011
9 min., digital video
A walk through the proscenium wings. You close your eyes and suddenly it is dark. (MHC)


"In the dream we call cinema there is no either, no or. We move from cave to forest to theater and back again, certain only that we are elsewhere, at least until the reel runs out. Here is objective truth, or “hypnosis” by another name." - Ben Russell

The Plant, Clark, 2012
8 min., digital video
A spy film, built on the bad geometry of point-of-view shots.

Sound Over Water, Clark, 2008
5min, 16mm
Blue sky and blue sea meet on emulsion.

The Dragon is the Frame, Clark, 2014
14 min., 16mm


An experimental detective film made in remembrance: keeping a diary, footnotes of film history, and the puzzle of depression.

What are you thinking?
I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.
What are you thinking now?

-       Jack Spicer, Psychoanalysis: An Elegy