Four Films by Mary Helena Clark

Four films by Mary Helena Clark

On the occasion of our publication of this generous interview between Mary Helena Clark and Chiara Haefliger, Mary Helena generously allowed us to share four of her films. As Chiara Haefliger writes, 'Clark’s films are typically short-form and, while they vary in their concerns or investigations, they share an elusive hypnotic quality: episodic, dreamlike.'

These films will be available for two weeks, until the 25th of March.

With many thanks to Mary Helena Clark for her generosity.

Orpheus (outtakes) (2012)

Using footage from Cocteau’s Orphée [1950], Mary Helena Clark optically prints an interstitial space where the ghosts of cinema lurk beyond and within the frames. – Andréa Picard

'Bresson said that when you hear a train whistle you see the entire train station. I fully subscribe to the power of suggestion: it’s the hypnotist’s tool as well. It probably started with Orpheus (Outtakes), where the black emulsion could really exist in any dimension. Orpheus (Outtakes) opens with a circular black emulsion in an empty white space. The camera then takes us within this emulsion, so that we emerge in the filmic space. That made me think about the gaps that we fill in with our minds and the reconciliation that we’re desperate to have, particularly when dealing with sound and image, but also with narrative cohesion: the idea that, if the camera is pointed at something and we’re looking at it for a certain amount of time, then it must mean something.' – Mary Helena Clark in conversation with Chiara Haefliger

The Glass Note (2018)

In The Glass Note, a collage of sound, image, and text explore cinema’s inherent ventriloquism. Across surface and form, the video reflects on voice, embodiment, and fetish through the commingling of sound and image.

In The Glass Note these are objects that are in a back-and-forth conversation about our own animacy. We throw our voice out there, we give an object life, but what else? The chair was so exciting because it was like, where does the body end? Or objects that feel like they are performing multiple different roles, like the lithophonic stones which actually sound like bells – where do they end? We see one very briefly in the habitat of an abandoned zoo, which was full of these bears and big rocks. They become monuments for me in that space. – Mary Helena Clark in conversation with Chiara Haefliger

Figure Minus Fact (2020)

Night, like mourning, remakes space through absence: forms at the threshold of perception heighten sound and touch. When someone dies there is a pull towards the concrete and tangible, but disbelief creates a world of unreliable objects. Figure Minus Fact draws and redraws coordinates between spaces, senses, and objects, groping in the dark, desiring to see something that’s not there. Spaces become evidentiary yet deceptive in a subjectless portrait of loss.

'The DNA of Figure Minus Fact was made by putting the sound of the swings with the bells. It's an attention to the apparatus as well as a total remixing of a sonic space. You’re hearing the noise, not the signal. You’re hearing the carriage of the bell and not the bell itself, and it doesn’t really make any sense. I’ve always been compelled by how, in a purely fantastical way, that rewrites the viewer’s body. It’s like, where is your ear and where is your eye? That, for me, is the biggest game of all.' –Mary Helena Clark in conversation with Chiara Haefliger

Exhibition (2022)

Exhibition moves through gallery rooms and archives, compounding multiple biographies into a single imaginary subject. A woman marries the Berlin Wall, stabs a Velásquez painting as an act of protest and longing, declares herself a doorknob, and plumbs the erotics of the Klein bottle. Using citation, appropriation, and museological forms of display, the film is a meditation on the assertion and refusal of subjecthood.

'The easier read of this film is that it’s against female objectification or a male gaze. But, really, it’s about female desire and trying to articulate a discomfort with subjecthood.' –Mary Helena Clark in conversation with Chiara Haefliger