My video essay “Women’s Time-Image” is mainly about two things: time and the body. It was delightful, and thrilling, to watch as both responses to the video, made by Alma Rechter and Maya Gadash, tackle each respectively in compelling, concentrated experiments.

Alma’s video takes on time. Her protagonist is Lisa, the tragic figure at the centre of Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman. We see Lisa in multiple configurations all at once, moving through the same space in different scenes, different times. Alma’s video does something subtle, almost sly, a reminder of how much a trickster editing can be: as we’re watching, we’re so absorbed in Lisa’s movements that it takes a few seconds to realise that she’s suddenly moving backwards. It’s a change so swift and so slight that it happens before we know it, before she knows it.

As the music crescendos, the interval between forward and backward motion gets shorter, and Lisa’s movements appear to be stuck in a loop, or a glitch, frozen in repetition. I think of another Deleuzian concept, his commentary on the masochistic pleasure of suspense (as in Masoch’s necessity of replicating frozen, marble works of art).[1] This reiteration towards stasis, deferment and displacement are key structures in melodrama. A genre where, as Lisa herself states in Alma’s video, time often moves past the self.

Maya’s video brings out the body. Her video tracks the movements of Julie, protagonist of Chantal Akerman’s Je Tu Il Elle. The first half of Akerman’s film feels like the definitive text on how bodies move in a room, how the singular (female) body takes up private space, how the absence of bodies is felt, and their presence strives to be recreated.

The way in which Maya manipulates Julie’s body is striking. By adjusting her speed, she slows her movements down. As Julie huddles in the corner, she seems to sublimate into the wall, so slowly that she becomes massless. When Maya overlays this with an image of Julie pushing a table away from her, it’s as if she’s taken on a new shape or form entirely: half-woman, half-table, moving strangely around an empty room and an echoed frame.

Not only do these videos respond to my original, they converse with each other. It’s an enchanting videographic alchemy that, beyond sparking conceptual ideas, also evokes a transporting spectatorship position for me: back to editing “Women’s Time-Image,” in a different time and body.

[1] Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 69.