When we cut our own

audiovisual bodies

It can sometimes hurt

We should look for ways

to care for these bodies

our bodies

with every cut

Videographic film criticism Christian Keathley

HEAL THE KNIFE Josef Beuys

How to approach the subject of abortion an experience I had in 1976 when I was just 17.

Deciding about abortion is not a unique problem disconnected from all other decisions but rather a dramatic and intensely lit example of the choices people make throughout their lives. 

James Gilligan

Liquid life William LeFleur

The cry of the unattained self Stanley Cavell

Endings and interruptions Bert Hellinger

JIZO SHRINE KURAMA JAPAN

Bert Hellinger (psychoanalyst and family constellation therapist) describes abortion as an interrupted movement. Something I did and something I didn’t do.

It was during a trip to Japan to tour a film called No Place (invited by Koyo Yamashita at Image Forum) that I remembered Jizo shrines to the unborn.

I recorded my trip on DVcam it was lonely and alien. I was having a correspondence with a Scottish man about a murder and reading Sombrero fallout A Japanese Novel by Richard Brautigan about a break up.

After Tokyo I went to meet a Professor of Animation in Kyoto and we visited Kurama the holy mountain. And there was the jizo shrine to the unborn I had hoped to find.

On my return I watched A Gentlewoman by Robert Bresson 1969

I filmed some moments off my Sony TV. I identified with the young girl’s nonchalance and over time I combined the elements.

I was studying Stanley Cavell’s autobiographical exercises, he writes that the act of finding entails the act of stealing, misgiving and burying as critical conditions for rediscovering

These aspects make an autobiographical exercise an act of mourning.

Screengrab Something and Nothing Screengrab It Might Even Be Kind of A Relief

Bresson ends A GENTLEWOMAN with a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet which I felt resonated the attitude of the Japanese to abortion neither pro choice or pro life rather permitting a grieving.

…..For in the very torrent tempest whirlwind of your passion

You must acquire and beget a temperance.’

SCREENGRABS SOMETHING AND NOTHING 2021

THE EMBRYO HUNTS IN SECRET Taiji ga mitsuryô suru toki 1966

Plot summary

A man keeps his girlfriend tied up in his small apartment and tortures her. She is undressed, subjected to various types of bondage, whipped, and tortured with a razor blade. He also brushes her hair, applies make-up on her, and breaks down and cries in the fetal position. In the end the girl gets free and has her revenge.

At the time of its release Wakamatsu was quoted as saying “For me, violence, the body and sex are an integral part of life.

MOZART SYMPHONY NUMBER 25 IN G MINOR

And have you ever listened to the descending cadences of the First Movement of Mozart’s Symphony number 25 in G Minor

and thought how much they foretell of what we now remember as club-rave music.

DAVYD MALCOLM CORRESPONDENT

G minor is considered the key through which Mozart best expressed sadness, thus the symphony is often called his first ‘tragic’ symphony.

THEA VON HARBOU LINK TO FILMING AMBIGUITY

Thea Von Harbou  joined the campaign against Germany’s paragraph 218, which made abortion a crime.^[15] At a mass rally in 1931, she said:^[15] Our main goal is to find a new form of preventing pregnancy and therefore to make the entire 218 unnecessary. Immediately, however, the paragraph must fall because it is no longer morally recognized by women. It is no longer a law. We need a new sexual code because the old was created by men and no man is in a position to understand the agony of a woman who is carrying a child she knows she cannot feed. This law derived from male psychology, which forces a woman into having a child, creates, even if not deliberately, constitutional inferiority of women in relation to men which serves as a bulwark against women’s activity in economic and political life.