Annie MacDonell: Two Films

Canadian artist-filmmaker Annie MacDonell has worked across media, from photography and sculpture to performance. She is a founding member of the feminist research/writing group, Emilia-Amalia.

Book of Hours (Canada, 2019)
In medieval times, a Book of Hours was a devotional volume, pages of text decorated with elaborate ornamentation.

MacDonell marries the modern form of the film-diary (Mekas style) – capturing, in fugitive motion, daily incidents of work and play at home – with echoes of this medieval practice, finding and collecting the vibrant patterns in reproduced images or carpets.

Words inspired by Georges Perec and clips from Yvonne Rainer’s 1970s films – shot off a charmingly uncleaned laptop screen – broaden the reference-set and deepen our understanding of this intimate chronicle of movements in space.

Communicating Vessels (co-director Maider Fortuné, Canada, 2020)
This compelling film transforms some famous “actions” from 1960s and ‘70s performance/video art into the stuff of interpersonal psychodrama.

An art school teacher (played by Fiona Reid) sits at her webcam relating the story of E., a gifted but also troubled student.

E.’s videos are inspired by Fluxus-style gestures. When she turns to her ailing mother as subject matter, however, a crisis intervenes – and the teacher literally re-enters the picture.

Elliptical abstraction here rubs shoulders with the thriller genre – which is quite a combo.

© Adrian Martin September 2019 / October 2020