Taking a line for a walk...
Following from the success of our 2022 StAnza workshop, "Taking Books for a Walk", we ask, how might we take a book we’re reading, the film or the art that we see, for a walk… letting the book or the art work talk to, even change, how we think about ourselves and the world? Might we be able to stage these encounters creatively and imaginatively?
The essays below are such adventures.
The Eternal Daughter
I have been thinking about unmothering of late… as a slow process of just letting your daughter be in the path she chooses to tread. But being made redundant is hard; what happens to my identity as mother when my child no longer wants to be mothered?… I watched The Eternal Daughter and some of the issues it explores made me think of the mother-daughter relationship in quite a different way. What happens when you foreground the daughter and not the mother? What happens when the ‘you’ as ‘mother’ is not self-indulgently centre stage….
American Fiction
American Fiction is screening at the DCA until the 22 February. Based on Percival Everett’s 2001 satirical novel, Erasure, it follows Thelonious "Monk" Ellison at a crisis point in his life. Ellison is a published African American novelist who is critically but not commercially successful. He writes literary and esoteric novels such as a retelling of the story of Euripides, and a parody of the work of French Post-Structuralists. His agent tells him that he needs instead to write a ‘black’ book to which he replies in exasperation, ‘I am black, and this is my book!’
The Zone of Interest
I’ve come out of the DCA cinema today puzzled and frustrated. The Zone of Interest, a film about the Höss family living next to Auschwitz, is perhaps the least pleasurable of the screenings I’ve been to of late, even as it has also seemed the most necessary. Representations of the Holocaust have to surmount the sometimes insurmountable: how to represent a historical event that seems unimaginable, unbearable and incomprehensible in its horror and magnitude, a primal wounding as it were to our understanding of what it means to be human.
All of Us Strangers: A conversation...
All of Us Strangers started its screen run at the local cinema, DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts), 26 January. I had been waiting for this film to appear at the local cinema for some time now….I was curious about how a film about grief, familial relationships, intimacy, and desire handles those issues through its central conceit taken from Tachi Yamada’s novel, Strangers. I went with my friend, Ruth Morrison.