Notes from the editors
NEW LINES
W A T E R a patient expanse, an unexpected surge. It doesn’t stay long, until it has a reason to stick around or flow some more. This marginally blue substance envelops, animates, drowns, consoles, terrorises and evaporates. Water is as elusive as an unfallen raindrop, as much as it gives form to the saltiest of tears and tidal waves.
Assembling this issue was a watery task: everyone and no one makes films and works towards written pieces on the earthliest of blues-greys-colourless. Understandably so: water is at once a destructive and vitalising force and a metonymy with the richest of symbolic meanings. Correspondingly, then, this collection of works embraces a vast spectrum of watery worlds. The works and articles presented here aspire a floating yet deep understanding of the delicate relationship between water and film.
Stephanie Lam traces the physical impact of water, fire and permafrost on celluloid in her review of Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time, whilst the Brussels-based Screening Research Group works towards a fluid poetics of a mobile cinema. Both pieces evoke the ever-changing meanings of film, including its fluid rites of passage and aquatic after effects.
Thi Phuong-Trâm Nguyen folds and unfolds ultramarine and midnight blues in her cyanotype series, as though illustrating the depths of Carol Mavor’s Book of Mary. The felt proximity between these two pieces is punctuated by both indications of placid patterns in Nguyen’s blueprints and by Mavor’s quietest of phrases: “I, too, become sea. It is not in me, it is of me.”
The sea turns electric in Laura Staab’s notes on the tentacular, in which she advances “the weight of withness between the world, our screens, ourselves.” Her written portrait of thin-skinned jellyfish and medusae presses close to Rebecca Loewen’s thin-lined filmic layers – responses to Michelangelo Antonioni’s never-finished fiction film Just for staying together.
Horizontal lines are at the heart of Hannah Paveck’s piece Indeterminate Waters, which traces the imbrication of oceanic materialities and the experience of dockside sex workers in Evangelia Kranioti’s 2015 essay film, Exotica, Erotica, Etc. In his response to James Benning’s 13 Lakes, Sander Hölsgens’ still images outline the Salton Sea. The lake’s salt-encrusted shores and deathly salinity-levels resemble the dusty film grain in his landscape images.
Equally site-specific, Marco Meneghin’s explores the representation of the Los Angeles River in Peter Bo Rappmund’s Psychohydrography (2010), a film built out of single takes as expansive as the Californian waterway.
For the editorial staff, this issue marks new beginnings. Over the last year, many of its contributors have crossed an ocean or two, if only to return to or land in their hometowns. Most of its staff writers met in London, whereas this new collaboration, including this print volume, is as placeless (or, perhaps, full of places) as water.
Sander Hölsgens and Hannah Paveck
