the lost days: Press Quotes
“One of the rare socially engaged contemporary travellers who upholds the high ethical and aesthetic principles in filmmaking, established by Chris Marker. Laura is a passionate traveller, but she does not fly or ride a bike. She travels by train and on foot. Years ago, when she travelled to the Philippines [sic], she went by boat so that she could see better. She makes her films alone and, although she has been filming for more than ten years, she has only made four short to medium-length films, and only looked through the camera lens for the first time in her most recent one, Border (2004). The Lost Days (1999), the story of a woman who travels across the world and sends video letters to a friend in New York, was made by asking fifteen friends from different cities (Marrakesh, Jaffa, Lisbon, Paris, Milan, Moscow, Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei) to pretend to be her and film their city through her eyes with a video camera. She reworked the gathered footage, shaping the material into an elliptical visual stream of consciousness and adding a poetic off-screen narration. This intricately woven study of melancholy, alienation, otherness, and difference could easily be paired in a double bill with Marker’s Sans Soleil.”
Jurij Meden, Kinoplus, Ljubljana
Read article: Pesaro 2005 – skakanje na glavo (Slovenian original)
“It is what allows her to make The Lost Days without having filmed a single shot. Here, the aim was to transform images filmed by other people in Europe, Asia and the Arab world into her own images. But aside from a retrospective appropriation—the calling into question of the concept of author—it is once again a way of seeing, of seeing with and through the eyes of other people. To join and mix together multiple points of view alien to one another into a single gaze—a gaze that stretches on a geographical scale towards the transversal. To make of the eye an organ, dedicated to voyage, to perpetual exile, one that ignores frontiers and encircles the world in an endless trajectory.”
Bouchra Khalili, The 51st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen Catalogue, Germany
Read catalogue essay: The Pain of Seeing (English translation)
“The tram appears to float, as it silently moves in slow motion, up the narrow alleys of Lisbon’s old town. The camera, as it peers outside, catches blurred impressions: hurried pedestrians, a street sweeper, old men leaning in doorways. “Sometimes,” says the woman’s voice off-screen, “when I watch the people, a feeling of sadness invades me and I think of all the other lives I could have had.” The Lost Days (1999) is a fictional travel diary by the thirty-two year old British video artist Laura Waddington. The images that unfold here, were not, in fact, recorded by the director but by her friends and acquaintances in fifteen cities using borrowed Hi-8 cameras. This is how The Lost Days becomes a game of perspectives: the images of many synthesised by Waddington’s editing and off-screen commentary into a single perspective, which is paradoxically both highly personal and fictional: “I would love so much to capture it, as it really is here—the sticky heat, the sleepless nights, the darkened interiors where the women sit, passing time—a whole world that doesn’t notice me.”
Maya Mckechneay, Falter, Vienna
Read article: Streifenweise (German original)
“Laura’s and Stephen’s films possess that certain heartwarming quality; in their presence you feel comfortable, as if you have arrived, as if you are at home. It feels like the kind of home that can be anywhere—especially within oneself. The mere knowledge that they exist, these wondrous films, has an effect. You love them, you need them. Like a bite of bread. As different as they are in form, content, and atmosphere—Stephen’s undisguised gaze at his friends’ smiles, even at their pain, and Laura’s diary, for which she asked friends around the globe to film in her place; the shots visually altered and interwoven with poetic language to create a sense of emotional closeness—these two films are, at once, so powerful and comforting that they point to something far beyond themselves: “Somehow not enough, somehow never enough, such beautiful things, such beautiful things.’”
Michael Pilz, Program notes by the director for his retrospective So Much Beauty, Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Vienna
“There’s something deeply erotic to Waddington’s works, particularly since The Lost Days when she stopped – then out of material necessity – to work with images running at normal speed and started to use slowed down moments made more passionate by Simon Fisher Turner’s soundscapes. Travelling becomes one with loving, the drawn-out, hyper-present moments become memories grasped at, the way one commonly tries to elongate the flow, fleeting moments of passion.”
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)
“Laura Waddington aims to make dreamlike films, not journalistic ones, countering typical media portrayals—for example, of illegal migration—with her own perspective, which comes to gradually align with the viewpoint of those affected. This merging of external and personal perspectives is something that she carries especially far in The Lost Days. For this project, she contacted people in fifteen countries … and asked them to film their hometowns. From the resulting footage —of Jaffa, Lisbon, Marrakesh, Paris, Sarajevo, and Taipei, and more—she created a fictional travel diary, that documents the impressions of a woman who is drawn to each new city, discovering it, and in the process grows increasingly alienated from her own home. By filming the footage directly off a television screen and distorting it to the point that cities blend together and the images become abstract forms, Waddington reflects the shifting mindset of the traveller: personal memories increasingly overshadow the actual experience, until, in the end, the decision to return home is made. The captivating beauty of the visual compositions in Waddington’s films, accompanied by Fisher Turner’s hypnotic music, is fascinating. Yet it is a beauty that emerges only from a deep intellectual and emotional engagement with the filmed material. Regarding reality, as people typically encounter it, the voice-over in The Lost Days expresses a clear stance, revealing that Waddington is not solely concerned with social critique but fundamentally with reflection and perception itself: “Too much beauty, impossible to film.”
Oliver Rahayel, Film Dienst, Bonn
“Travel is a recurring motif in Laura Waddington’s work. Time and again, her films convey the existential state of being on the move, where travel becomes a way to experience both the world and oneself. In 1996, Waddington wrote a story about a young woman traveling across Europe, Asia, and Russia, capturing situations and moments with a camera, and sending them in the form of video letters to a friend in New York. That same year, Waddington contacted fifteen people in different cities, writing to them about her character and asking them to film their cities as if they were her—“I wanted them to really live her journey.” As Waddington—who was living illegally in the USA, at the time and unable to travel— gradually received these tapes from around the world, her conception of the character began to shift. She filmed passages from screens repeatedly, reworked the colours, and altered the speed until all the contributions took on an almost uniform visual quality, as if they had all been filmed by the same person. The result was the video The Lost Days—just one possible sequence from the infinite possibilities that she could have crafted from the available material. It tells the story of a woman who is drawn to each new city, roaming its streets, having encounters, discovering new things, tying out different ways of living, and eventually moving on. She feels at home nowhere, belongs nowhere—until finally, she decides to return. “She reminded me of a sentence I had once read, I miss the world … ‘I feel homesick for each and every country.’” This traveling, searching figure, who breaks away from familiar references and ties, ventures into the unknown, engages with the new and unfamiliar to expand her horizons, open up perspectives and test her own limits, reflects an approach that also determines Laura Waddington’s later films. She travels to, and inhabits, her filming locations to see others and encounter the unfamiliar, always looking to experience herself within this otherness and uncertainty.”
Eva Kuhn, Border – ein filmisches Gedenken oder Die videografischen Spuren von Laura Waddington, Universität Basel
“A story told with many cameras; a young woman whom we never see, but whose point of view is captured by fifteen camera operators recruited by English filmmaker Laura Waddington, to film their cities as stages on the journey of a fictional character. Through these fifteen perspectives, The Lost Days transports us from Jaffa to Taipei, passing through Bosnia, Hong Kong, Moscow, and other equally evocative cities. With each new Hi-8 cassette that she received during the year spent making the project, Laura would modify her road story about this wandering girl, lost in time, mediating on the things that she believes to disappearing. Re-filmed off a television screen, slowed down, re-coloured, saturated, these visually synthesised images plunge us into a forty-minute journey that is fabulously sensual, melancholic, poetic…”
Patrick Pearce, Tournages webzine, Montreal
“A strange feeling of melancholy haunts Laura Waddington’s The Lost Days. A young woman is on a journey. Her first stops are Marrakesh, Lisbon and Paris. But the cities are just a backdrop for her imagination. Hazy streets, fleeting images from another world. A meditation on what we are and where we come from. A portrait of being on the road and being lost in time.”
Andreas Burkhardt, tip Berlin, Berlin
“Two years later, she continued her work of exploration with The Lost Days, the story of a globe-trotting young woman, who sends video letters to a friend in New York. In fact, using the internet, the filmmaker contacted fifteen people in different countries and asked them to film their cities as if they were her protagonist. Laura Waddington does not believe in an objective reality and prefers to present a partial and incomplete vision “like a sort of notebook.” Her experimental forays on the porous borders of documentary and fiction provoke the viewer by prompting them to question the veracity of the narrative.”
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)
“Waddington’s is undoubtedly a cinema of migration, initially conceived as the recounting of an existential condition (the author lived without papers for many years in New York) and later as a crossing, a passage towards other places, other confines. The choice to use video corresponds with a need to maintain complete stylistic and production freedom, far from the model of cinema in the strict sense, so much so that her first films do not contain scenes directly shot by her but a patient work of montage. Her wandering gaze places at the center of the lens, “corps déplaces”, in transit, on the edges of the world, often barely recognisable with the borders of the frame”.
Stefania Rimini, Immaginazioni: Riscritture e ibridazioni fra teatro e cinema, Bonanno Editore, Italy
Read book chapter: Frammenti di cinema resistente (Italian original)
“The vague images, often shot from a car windscreen, show sunlit, snow-covered or blue-shadowed roads, street corners and alley ways in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and the Far East seem to follow one another endlessly. Passers-by move past, accompanied by street sounds, soft, murmuring music and the voice of an anonymous woman telling the stories of her travels and reflections on her lover in New York, who is hopefully still waiting for her”
Teddi Dols, The 18th World Wide Video Festival Catalogue, Amsterdam
Read catalogue essay: The Lost Days
“A story comes to life: after writing a tale about a young girl travelling through Europe and Asia and filming what she sees, Laura Waddington contacted people in fifteen different countries. She asked them to film their own cities, as if they were her protagonist. Out of these ruminations has come a wistful video that delves deep into the heart of a place, from the point of view of an outsider but one who seems to have her finger on the pulse, wherever she is”
The New York Video Festival 2000, Film Society of Lincoln Center program notes
“The Lost Days is also the story of a journey, and here, even more than in Irit Batsry’s film, there is a pronounced attempt to construct an entire film using the gaze and images created by others. ‘In 1996, I wrote a story about a young woman who traveled across Europe, Russia, and Asia, filming the things she saw. That year, I contacted people in fifteen countries and asked them to film their cities for me, as if they were her. Later, I reworked their images to create the journey as I had imagined it.’ The images, grainy to the point of disintegration, maintain an evocative intimacy between the filmed locations and the narrating voice, while a fictional device evokes the memory of these places as if they were experienced firsthand by the narrator. One of the two narrating voices is that of Chantal Akerman, the Belgian filmmaker known for Je, Tu, Il, Elle, Nuit et Jour, D’Est, and other memorable films. The music is composed by Simon Fisher Turner, who also created the soundtrack for Derek Jarman’s Blue.”
Piccola enciclopedia dell’immaginario tecnológico: Media, arte, communicazione, Oscar Mondadori, Milan
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