Her* Hands and His Shape

A cinematic séance: a live dual 16mm projection performance summoning a counter-lineage of film history. A deeply material engagement with the magic of the moving image, picking up on specters and amplifying the haunting through a tactile reshaping of inherited materials.

Do you believe in ghosts? An incantation becomes a refrain in this double projection of sequences from films by women who made films politically, or gave their presence to films politically. Their doubles appear recaptured through Krasnogorsk-3 and Bolex lens and intertwined with landscapes and objects that once haunted the filmmakers. It’s all in her* hands shaping his form, her* labor questioning his authority. 

Programme section: Between Film and Art
Original title: Her* Hands and His Shape | Year: 2017 | Duration: 15′
Country: Austria, Russia | Language: French, English | Subtitles: English
Director: Sílvia das Fadas, Masha Godovannaya

FESTIVALS & AWARDS (SELECTION) 

Biennale of Moving Images, Geneva, 2022 – World premiere |  E-flux screening room, New York, 2022

DIRECTOR’S BIO 

Sílvia das Fadas is a filmmaker, researcher and curateacher, and founder of Cinema Fulgor, a nomadic platform for cinematic experiences, based in southern Portugal. Her films and expanded cinema performances have screened at Media City Film Festival, the Austrian Film Museum, Doclisboa, CPH:DOX, MoMa, Courtisane Festival and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, among others, receiving recognition for their formal rigor and poetic approach to inquiry. 

Masha Godovannaya is an experimental filmmaker, queer-feminist researcher, and educator, and holds a PhD in Practice from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her films and installations have been presented at Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, and Liverpool Biennial, IFFR, Oberhausen Film Festival and Ann Arbor Film Festival, among others, and are distributed by Light Cone and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

Cinema is an art of ghosts, it carries the potential to conjure and bring back the dead. In a dual screen phantasmagoria, «her* hands and his shape», we will conjure past and future ghosts  of women who made films politically, or gave their presence to films politically. Their doubles will appear intertwined with landscapes and objects that once haunted us and will continue to do so every time they will be taken out of their suspended animation through the means of projection. We refuse to forget. We refuse to participate in the disenchantment of the world. Our hands scratched and shot new images while stealing images from others, in fresh and outdated film stocks. Our hands developed the images in the dark, negative and positive, shadows of shadows. Our eyes widened in view of the spectral images appearing in the surface of the film strips, and each time our disquiet hands will interfere and throw color and light to those images on screen. There’s no avoiding the ghosts in the machines; in moments of haunted liveness such as this all is doomed to disappear and return in other shapes.  As soon as she crossed the bridge the phantoms came to meet her.