Film About a Woman Who

“Film About a Woman Who” is a multi-layered composite of images, texts, music, and speech that deals with oppositions of emotional life set off against the appearances of everyday behaviour. The story of a passage across an unspecified length and order of time is sustained by the intermittent narration of two off-screen voices (a man’s and a woman’s, never clearly identified with the on-screen characters) that reads, in the present tense, discrete paragraphs about the experiences of someone referred to only as “she.” On screen two men and two women and, occasionally, a child “play out” the valences of their interdependencies in word and gesture, gaze and stillness, in – to use Louise Brooks’s phrase -”unhinged fragments of reality.” Correspondence between image and narration at any given moment ranges from metaphoric cohesion to calculated incongruity. Subtitles and intertitles function as both counterpoint and connective tissue between sequences. The subjective, obsessive eye of the camera combined with the dry impersonal tone of the narration creates a constant flux of tension, absurdity, intense drama, and pathos.