Fragments of moving image, performance art, paintings, etchings, and prints materialize and dissipate, and a dialogue between these impressions opens up like a portal of ambiences, coming into focus yet remaining out of grasp. Slender and essayistic, A Horse at Night roams through the literature and visual art in Cain’s subconscious, from the words of Virginia Woolf, Rachel Cusk and Toni Morrison to filmmakers including Chantal Akerman and David Lynch. Fictional figures have a presence in Cain’s perception as real as nonfictional friends - they are all here, in conversation with her daily habits. “For better or for worse,” writes Cain, I have always combined one place with another, lived in one landscape while dreaming of another.” The spaces evoked by writers, the memories of beloved characters, their feelings and impulses, reside dynamically in Cain’s imagination. There are superimposed beaches from Cain’s past and future, and from the fictions of Marguerite Duras and Elena Ferrante, among others. This tender merging is echoed in Amina Cain’s first nonfiction book, A Horse at Night, as are the beaches. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.” As a filmmaker, Varda worked toward bridging the borders between fiction and documentary, creating a form of hybrid that holds different resonances of truth. In The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès Varda says “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |