The Soft Space

(Sofia Bohdanowicz & Melanie Scheiner, Canada, 2018)

The cinema’s deepest vocation is the discovery of what Charles Baudelaire called the hidden, secret correspondences between very different things – their surprising affinities, echoes, homologies.

In this 4-minute film, Sofia Bohdanowicz and performer Melanie Scheiner (collaborating as co-directors) pass ceaselessly between the forms and shapes of a train station, and the fragmented glimpses of a “geography of a body” (as in Willard Maas’ 1943 film).

There is no simple, readable metaphor here. There are only corners, orifices, muscles, joints, movements, panels, flesh, lights, eyes – proliferating in comparative montage, and in our visual memory.

The Soft Space exudes an authentically artisanal physicality and concreteness.

© Adrian Martin November 2019