‘As Tears Go By…’: Marianne Faithfull & Anna Karina

In this audiovisual essay, Anna Karina and Marianne Faithfull talk to themselves and to each other across six different films. Bitterly, blatantly, brutally: they muse—using words written by men and songs composed by men—on what it means (for all of us: there ain't escape from the culture) to perform, inside and outside the fiction, as women invented by men...

‘Playing’

It's a little known fact that Adrian Martin enjoys playing the keyboard and that, sometimes, I enjoy filming him. Normally, what I'll do is listen from another room because our house has great acoustics and, when he plays, the music spreads across the space beautifully. But, occasionally, I get inspired and flutter around with my phone—or, as some people like to say (especially of women): I dabble...

Le moi et le je: ‘Jane B. par Agnès V.’ (Agnès Varda, 1987)

Singing a Gainsbourg song isn't easy. He likes his syllables unnaturally stressed or flattened, lengthened or sharpened; he enjoys writing with unequal, undulating metric; he's fond of enjambements that break—across different verses—single sentences and, sometimes, even single words. Many of his lyrics frolic in wordplay; they delight in polysemic and homophonic terms—disseminating multiple meanings and messing with similar sounds...

The Long Road: ‘Liberté et Patrie’ (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 2002)

The 'and' functions to always carry the links forward—but it also operates across each pair ("freedom and fatherland, fatherland and freedom": the visual and aural back-and-forth is a constant in the film). It's the movement effected by the 'and' that frees the terms from themselves, and frees the pairs from themselves—threading relations that multiply and amplify, that give substance, background and meaning, that constellate a veritable cosmos out of those two initial notions...

Running with Keith Jarrett

It's winter, 2014. I have resolved to start running. There's a very green park, next to where we live in Frankfurt. I observe a Japanese woman training. It occurs to me, now, that she could have been a world champion of some sort of running-related sport. But, that day of 2014, for some reason, I decide to take her as the average person on whom I will model my running. She runs so fast, so vigorously, that it's almost obscene. I do not know how to run, so I copy her. That is a manner of speaking – for, after a few minutes, I feel like I'm going to die. I'm exhausted, I can't breathe, my chest is burning. I cry...