Sophie Calle
Produced for British television in 2006, Sophie Calle attempts to make some concerted sense of the French artist’s motivations behind her work. Ms. Calle has become well known in recent years for her obsessive analyses of the minutiae of everyday lie and the inherent drama that can be found in the ostensibly banal.
Ms. Calle’s career began after returning to Paris from a lengthy vacation, which seems to have been designed to allow her to disappear to all those that previously knew her. Upon returning she embraced her anonymity and began to follow strangers and document them by creating journals tracking their movements, hypothesizing along the way as to the details of their lives. Soon enough Calle began photographing her subjects and even took a job as a chambermaid in order to stand amongst the banal objects of the everyday life of her subjects. The question that Calle’s work continually asks is can we come to know the true nature of another, and as an extension of this, can we thus really know ourselves?
This documentary excels because the director, Susan Shaw, consults with author Paul Auster, who once modeled a character in one of his novels after Ms. Calle, and Ms. Calle’s curator. The two men both seem to admire and somewhat distrust Ms. Calle because her exhibitions only really allow the outsider to ever interact with her as a fictional character of sorts. Whereas most creations reveal some sense of who the artist is, Ms. Calle’s various voyeuristic narratives seem to be completely controlled affairs, with her ‘true self’ as a consciously and carefully mitigated enigma.
Main Film/Diagonals
Perhaps one of the most enjoyable aspects of this year’s festival were the two series that showed off predominantly experimental short works that were primarily crafted by local filmmakers. The Main Film series highlighted some of the projects that the great Montreal independent filmmaking institution has funded more recently. Kicking off the series was a round table discussion tabled by several filmmakers, including Phyllis Katrapani, who contributed two films to the ongoing program. Main Film is an integral institution and it fills in a much-needed gap left between many independent filmmakers and government funding.
The Diagonals series carried probably the most enjoyable collection of pleasant surprises that the festival had to offer. Of the many short films that were screened over the course of the series, two films in particular stand out as perhaps the best that I’d seen at this year’s FIFA. Nelly-Eve Rajotte’s 16-minute time/space experiment Aika played like a fractured Structuralist film, as the images and sounds of a stroll through Berlin became horizontally disembodied. Aika is the perfect phenomenological exploration. Similarly, Christoph Brech’s Punto captures Rome through the kaleidoscopic perspective of the reflection of the city streets in his Fiat Punto’s hood. What sounds like a series of silly audio/visual experiments proves to be somewhat groundbreaking work. It appears that the most simplistic concepts can indeed challenge one the most. FIFA should be applauded for taking a chance with these aggressive films, as this sort of risk taking is the stuff of the vanguard.
