Artists Space

Fifty Minutes and Everness are both films in which on-screen voices consider the possibility of a “word that has the power to change one’s life,” to quote one of Cesarco’s protagonists. In Everness, a couple is suspended between spoken thoughts on literary genre from a discourse on tragedy to inhabited allusions to James Joyce’s The Dead. A cinematic depiction of their domestic lives unfolds onscreen, with tenderness and sadness, a silent breakfast, and two well-played vinyl records. Moyra Davey’s Fifty Minutes is an auto-portrait no less invested in the impact of reading on art making. In Davey’s case, the video documents her own circumstances, living, reading, photographing and writing, in the wake of a five-year psychoanalysis and the events of September 11. Digressions, monologues and musings on literature and war, from Natalia Ginzburg to Vivian Gornick, Baudrillard and Freud, flesh out the telling of the central story. For both Davey and Cesarco, to be a reader is to be a maker, texts are mirrors, and these works are lights between the page and the reflection.

This program is preceded by Cinema Elaine.

This project is made possible in part with public funds from NYSCA’s' Electronic Media and Film Presentation Funds grant program, administered by The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes (www.NYSCA.org www.eARTS.org).