noonwraith blues (2020)

Format: 35mm cinegrams and Super8, transferred to HD, b&w and colour
Country: UK/USA
Duration: 3 mins 37 secs
Direction: Kamila Kuc
Photograms: Kamila Kuc
Camera: Reed O’Beirne
Editing: Kamila Kuc / Reed O’Beirne
Sound: Rob Godman

noonwraith blues website
British Council Film Directory.

Ominous 35mm cinegrams of Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 Melencolia print are intercut, like cascading scythes, with saturated super-8 film of a woman in a fresh-cut farm field, evoking repetitions that exist in harvest rituals, as well as in gestures of madness. Specters of familial anxieties creep into this loose take on the myth of Poludnica (noonwraith or Lady Midday), a Slavic harvest spirit that could cause madness in those who wandered the fields alone. The starting point for this subtle portrayal of the familial effects of transgenerational trauma is Erwin Panofsky’s Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (1955) in which he associates Dürer’s engravings with fear, withdrawal, depression and madness. In this pastoral horror, luscious landscape serves as the site of a woman’s idyllic childhood memories but ones that are disturbed by her ancestors’ experiences of wars and domestic violence. The interplay of the banal and the uncanny is highly suggestive as the film poses a question of whether the effects of trauma can reverberate down the generations through epigenetics?

‘Presence, memory and ancient folkloric sensibilities latent within the fabric of the landscape are evoked through gesture, ritual and physical interaction with the filmstrip.’
Lydia Beilby, Short Film Programmer, Edinburgh International Film Festival (2021)

Thanks to Jerzy Kuc, Kerry Laitala, University of New Mexico, Experiments in Cinema Festival and the participants of the Cinegram Workshop, Albuquerque, 2015. Additional thanks to Caryn Cline, Cecelia Condit, Sally Cloninger, Jill Daniels, Jerry Duba, Tessa Garland, Marta Hawkins, Sean Kenny, Michelle Mellor, Scott Stark, Amanda Sterling, Patrick Tarrant and Lili White.

Screenings:
Nadezda Petrovic Art Gallery, Cacak, Serbia, 2022
The 23rd dresdner schmalfilmtage, Motorenhalle – Project Center for Contemporary Art, Dresden, Germany, 2022.
Edinburgh International Film Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2021.
Kinoskop International Festival of Analog Experimental Cinema, 2021.
Images Festival, Toronto, ON, Canada, 2021.
International Video Art Forum, the Culture and Arts Association, Dammam, Saudi Arabia, 2021.
The Bomb Factory Artist’s Film Festival, The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, London. Winner of the Jury Award, 2020/21.
Super 8 Film & DV Festival, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, online. Honourable Mention Award, 2021.
California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, USA, 2021.
Film Maudit, LA, California, USA, 2021.
another experiment by women film festival, 2020.
ANALOGICA 10, 2020.
Swedenborg Film Festival, London, 2020.
Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Seattle, WA, USA, 2020.
Antimatter [Media Art] Festival, Victoria, BC, Canada, 2020.
58th Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, 2020.
Experiments in Cinema, Albuquerque, The Pandemic Edition, NM, USA, 2020.
Boston Short Film Festival, Boston, MA, USA, 2020.
Courts d’un soir, Montréal, Canada, 2020.
Visions in The Nunnery, Bow Arts, London, UK, gallery and online, 2020.
CROSSROADS, San Francisco Cinematheque, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2020.
Obskuur Ghent Film Festival, Ghent, Belgium, 2020.