Martha Haslanger
2021Circus Riders
Martha Haslanger
There are three characters in Circus Riders: the ventriloquist, the deaf-mute and the mime. They tell the story of story-making, which as they find out, demands perspective. The more they tell, the more distanced they are forced to become. Conversely, the more they stay within the subject(ivities) of their stories, the less they lose of their present and the less is their need to tell.
Circus Riders
Syntax
Martha Haslanger
As the word "syntax" implies, this film deals with the way in which images and sounds come together. Its main concern, however, goes deeper, and resides within a more personalised syntax: a process of retaining a narration. Syntax is a small gem, exhibiting...a kind of joyful, competent wit and strength. Haslanger prowls her camera through several rooms in an ordinary middle class house while her voice-over describes what we are about to see or have seen, never what is actually on the screen, wringing the changes of the relationship of the spoken word, image and the printed word. It is a wonderfully self-contained and seductive film.
Syntax
Frames and Cages and Speeches
Martha Haslanger
…experiments with frames and framing, cages and caging, speeches and speaking. It is a film ( a seven act ‘play’) which deals with the medium’s narration of us and our narration of it. Frames are developed according to the stories one believes in, Cages re-form experience into expression, and Speeches translate what we know into narration. An extension of work begun in the file Syntax. – M.H.
Frames and Cages and Speeches