‘I dreamt my daughter had become a fried egg…’ explains one of the interviewees in ‘Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs’, a new film by British artist Beatrice Gibson. The dream-recounting segment is typical of a work that, like a half-remembered scene snatched from the land of nod, both makes sense and doesn’t make sense. Or rather, it makes sense but mainly in the way that a feeling ‘makes sense’.
The 20-minute film (title in translation: ‘Two Sisters Who Aren’t Sisters’) is being shown at Camden Arts Centre alongside its companion work, another short film called ‘I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead’. ‘Deux Soeurs’ is an adaptation of a 1929 screenplay by Gertrude Stein, while the other film takes its name from a poem by American writer CAConrad. Both deal with the question of what we do in times of crisis, whether that’s political, economic or personal.
Of the two, ‘Deux Soeurs’ is the less coherent. Wobbly scenes shot on a handheld camera are placed next to each other like jigsaw pieces roughly sorted but not yet clicked down firmly. There’s a lost dog – a white French poodle with neatly clipped pom-pom legs – a pregnant lady musing on the concept of ‘home’, some moments in a car, the child-into-egg dreamer and more.
Presumably this will all mean more to viewers with a working knowledge of Stein’s original, but to the uninitiated it would be hard to identify the overarching idea of the piece if someone had hidden the gallery notes.
‘I Hope I’m Loud’ uses a similar arrangement of fragmented scenes, but here it somehow just works. Segments of poetry from female writers including Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich intermingle with shots of ice collapsing into the sea, tarot cards being dealt and the tube stations of the District and Circle lines flashing by.
There’s a building sense of menace, an unnameable hint of bad things lurking. And by the time it gets to the final scene of mother and child boogieing to ’90s club hit ‘Rhythm of the Night’ it all becomes clear: this is what we do when we no longer know what to do; we make friends, we make art and we dance.