zone: Press Quotes
“In Zone, the observing subject is the filmmaker herself, who travels on a cruise ship with a hidden camera. Here, too, the voice-over sets the tone, a reflection on longing and loss. The motif of the journey as a search for identity runs like a thread through all of Waddington’s works. The destinations are unknown and unimportant; what matters is the experience itself. These experiences are not passively undertaken; rather, the filmmaker participates in the stories and the lives of those she films.”
Oliver Rahayel, Film Dienst, Bonn
“She boards the ship, the QE2, from New York to England. The situation implies unavoidable solitude: the passengers in their cabins do not notice the sea. Alone, a woman paces up and down the decks, looking for a man, who is perhaps not there or who simply does not exist. It would be wrong to suspect voyeurism in the use of a camera, normally reserved for spying. For what Laura Waddington is really tracing is her capacity to renounce her gaze and abandon herself to the movement of her body in order to produce a trembling of vision… a gaze that encompasses everything in a single gesture.”
Bouchra Khalili, The 51st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen Catalogue, Germany
Read catalogue essay: The Pain of Seeing (English translation)
“At first I kept viewing video in terms of film, like a poor relation. I thought I had to find a way to make it my own. So I made the decision to film without using my eyes in order to completely unlearn. I hoped that if I worked in this way when I came back to using a normal video camera it would be like filming for the first time. I bought a spy camera and sewed it into a Turkish waistcoat. The waistcoat was covered in small circular mirrors and I removed one of the mirrors and put the camera in its place. Then I boarded a cruise ship, crossing the Atlantic. On the ship I had no way of seeing what I was filming and had to learn to trust the movement of my body. After a while I realised the angle wasn’t good – the camera was sloping upwards so I had to adopt a very strange walk, my shoulders hunched over.”
Interview with Laura Waddington by Olaf Möller, 41a Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema Pesaro Catalogue, Italy
Read: Interview with Laura Waddington (English original)
Read: Interview with Laura Waddington (Italian translation)
“In Zone… instead, it is the body that becomes a diaphragm and carries out new possible forms of witness. The proximity of the video camera to the body, in fact, makes the hybridization between body, gaze and machine more complex compared to the relationship established by Vertov and Snow.”
Cecilia Bima, Lacune visive: Bassa definizione per un’etica della testimonianza
Read chapter: Zone: un esercizio di disapprendimento per “riarmare gli occhi” (English translation)
Read chapter: Zone: un esercizio di disapprendimento per “riarmare gli occhi” (Italian original)
“But she does not stop there. She sets about methodically destroying this trembling image: she re-films the images in video, then breaks through the layers to get closer to the consistency of film. There is nothing redemptive in this re-working of texture. It is, in fact, the degrading of the original recording to better reveal the nature of its vision: impure, fragile and haphazard. This ceding of control is why there will be no fetish of the recorded image in the cinema of Laura Waddington.It is what allows her to make The Lost Days (1999) without having filmed a single shot.”
Bouchra Khalili, The 51st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen Catalogue, Germany
Read catalogue essay: The Pain of Seeing (English translation)
“When I recall those months, that I spent immersed inside layers of video, searching for something, which I never found—Zone reveals little of the long experiment—I think of the words of Michelangelo Antonioni: ‘Under the revealed image, there is another one which is more faithful to reality, and under this one there is yet another, and again another under this last one, down to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that nobody will ever see. Or perhaps, not until the decomposition of every image, every reality’ I had failed to get beneath the shallow surface of video. Unlike the flicker of film which draws you into the screen, the flow of video images, which I re-filmed off my monitor were, like the story that grew out of them, hazy and opaque.“
Laura Waddington, Scattered Truth
Read writing: Scattered Truth part 2a
“Zone (1995) is an experiment, an attempt on the artist’s part to reevaluate and deconstruct the teachings acquired during her education in the practice of cinema. More concretely, the documentary sets in motion dynamics that aim to dismantle and question the foundations of conventional cinematographic language.”
Cecilia Bima, Lacune visive: Bassa definizione per un’etica della testimonianza
Read chapter: Zone: un esercizio di disapprendimento per “riarmare gli occhi” (English translation)
Read chapter: Zone: un esercizio di disapprendimento per “riarmare gli occhi” (Italian original)
“Initially, video was a way for her to overcome practical difficulties: “When I was living in New York, I met electronic musicians who were making and distributing music out of their apartments. I felt that cinema would eventually move in the same direction and that with a small camera, even if I couldn’t find production funds, I’d always be able to keep shooting.” With video, she says she wanted to “unlearn” the reflexes that she had acquired while shooting film. By recording “without using (her) eyes” as she did in Zone, filmed in 1995 on a transatlantic ship with a video camera sewn into her jacket.”
Mathilde Blottière and Laurent Rigoulet, Télérama, Paris
Read article: Laura Waddington: La caméra clandestine (English translation)
Read article: Laura Waddington: La caméra clandestine (French original)
“Stylized surveillance footage constructs a dreamlike narrative of desire and loss.”
5th New York Video Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center program notes
“Laura Waddington is afraid of flying: She doesn’t board a plane, ever (well, ever….). Instead, she travels by bus or train or ship – the latter, the most archaic in a lot of ways, being the locus of two videos, Zone (1995) and Cargo (2001). The old-fashioned ways used nowadays mainly by those lacking the funds for luxuries like time… The world slows down like that while growing back again to an older yet more natural size. It’s 19th century redux, befitting an oeuvre with a social agenda which for so many of the airplane-internet-mobile-set, Today’s People, feels passé but isn’t for the majority of human beings on this planet, Earth.”
Olaf Möller, 41a Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema Pesaro Catalogue, Italy
Read catalogue essay: The Days and Years of My Travels (English original)
Read catalogue essay: The Days and Years of My Travels (Italian translation)
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