Le Silence #2: Film Still (2017). Emma Bolland
The Iris Opens / The Iris Closes: Le Silence
The first performance of my new work The Iris Opens / The Iris Closes: Le Silence, part of an ongoing interrogation / re-imagining of Louis Delluc’s lost film Le Silence (1920), using Delluc’s surviving scene notes, will take place on April 1st at the Future Imperfect / Imperfect Cinema Symposium at Plymouth University. This first public iteration will take the form of a hybrid screening/paper/performed screenplay, drawing on the silent film traditions of the ‘exhibitor’ (Europe / USA) and the benshi (Japan), wherein films were explained (sometimes re-ordered), or creatively narrated and interpreted by live performers. Delluc’s scene notes describe a film enacted entirely in flashbacks moving towards the recollection of a violent and traumatic event, and I propose that Delluc’s title itself, Le Silence, suggests that narratives of trauma cannot be spoken.
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The Dreamers (2017)
The Dreamers
Ameena Anjum, Ameera Al-Aji, Andrea Berry, Emma Bolland, Luke Chapman, Helen Clarke, Louise Finney, Rebecca Jagoe, Sharon Kivland, John McDowall, Debbie Michaels, Rachel Smith, Rachel Taylor, Lunzhao Wu
ISBN 978-1-910055-29-8
MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE
130 mm x 190 mm, 148 pages, perfect-bound
£10.00 / 12 euros
‘Writing, Walking, Dreaming… Walking (literally and figuratively, one might say sleepwalking) is explored herein. Walking and dreaming provide ways of knowing a place. They lead to encounters with strangers and with ourselves. The city is the stage for autobiographical encounters; where houses and memories meet; where the uncanny is both home and away; where the stranger leads us down the rabbit hole. There are drifts through Jacques Lacan’s Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’ and Walter Benjamin’s ‘A Berlin Chronicle’; urban nightmares; the homesick child; enigmatic staircases; snapshots of the past and lost objects; reflections on writing; seeing words as images; and prophetic dreams. Amsterdam slips into a New York bar, and a dystopian group recounts its anxieties.’
The Dreamers will be available at:
PAGES Leeds | International Contemporary Artists’ Book Fair
The Tetley, Leeds, 4 and 5 March 2017, 10 a.m. to p.m.
and on MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE’s table at MISS READ: Berlin Art Book Festival 2017
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 14, 15, 16 July
You can buy The Dreamers online here.
