AA

Director: Cynthia Madansky
Cinematography: Nikolay Zheludovitch
Music: Ksenia Fedorova
16 mm ◊ 18 min.

“But I keep on finding the wrong things.” — Anna Alchuk

Adapted from the dream diaries of Russian avant-garde poet, photographer, and performance artist Anna Alchuk, AA is among the most experimental, impressionistic, and elusive of Cynthia Madansky’s contributions to her ongoing Feminist Writer Series.

While each entry to the suite of shorts operates by way of an exchange and interplay between text and image, with AA there exists an even more complex exchange at the level of imagery, a mix of original material and home videos, art work, book design, typographic iterations and the intertitles from the dreams themselves.

Madansky repeatedly frames Alchuk’s daughter and grandson in a hallway holding photographs and other artworks by Alchuk, creating a polysemous echo and interplay between past and present. Musician Ksenia Federova gives voice to excerpts from Alchuk’s diary in song accompanying an avant-garde score on piano that would feel well-suited to a silent feature.

The textual passages from the dream diaries, written during and after a very challenging personal/political experience, range from the uncanny (“I had a dream about a Ferris wheel”) to the nightmarish (“I put a young man in the oven”) are in dialogue with visual material that resonates with familiar scenes of childhood, marriage and raising a family alongside Alchuk’s photographic work that critiques patriarchy, religion and nationalism. The interplay of visual and sonic fragments are threaded through with fear and anxiety, and gain an added, tragic weight in light of Alchuk’s untimely death.

Part of the Feminist Writers Series, an ongoing suite of films, inspired by the words of radical international feminists. Ranging from canonized to little-known figures, and unbeholden by genre, the films cite and respond to works of poetry, novels, theatre, theory, political writing, and other nonfiction.