by MATTHEW HAYS

It was Canadian filmmaker Anne Wheeler who, expressing relief at moving into fiction filmmaking from the world of nonfiction movies, stated that exploitation was virtually unavoidable while making documentaries. Focusing your camera on “the real thing” meant taking something from someone else, and rejigging it for your own purposes.

New York-based artist Irit Batsry examines this question in her latest work, the feature-length experimental These Are Not My Images (neither there nor here). As the title implies, Batsry takes on the essential question around capturing the capital-T Truth, or what so many audiences read as the truth while watching non-fiction filmmaking. As is often the case with experimental works, narrative takes a back seat to a striking juxtaposition of filmed ideas. Batsry reconfigures the imagery she captures in a series of beautiful montage sequences; there are also a series of slowed-down camera movements. Often, Batsry makes us think about the act of seeing itself, merely by showing us images that are intentionally out of focus.

If the subject of exploitation is often a part of the debates surrounding documentary itself, it always is when First World filmmakers aim their cameras on the Third World. Thus These Are Not My Images is the fictional story of a Western doc filmmaker shooting in India with a half-blind tour guide. Pasolini is quoted: “A Westerner going to India has everything, but gives nothing. India has nothing, but gives everything.”

But despite the Pasolini quote and the medium within which she’s working, Batsry’s formal manipulation expands her meditation beyond cinema itself—her imagery suggests painting, photography, video and digital technology.

In essence, Batsry is poses questions surrounding the making of images—any images whatsoever. The artist has skillfully raised questions through her form, in a work that implies that these questions are so complex that they almost certainly never will be answered. :

These Are Not My Images screens
Friday, Oct. 4-8 in French and on
Tuesday, Oct. 8 in English at Ex-Centris

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