Oblivion

(Stephen Dwoskin, UK, 2005)

The great experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin frequently explored his own disability – stricken by polio early in childhood, he spent his later life in a wheelchair – and turned it into powerful, richly metaphoric art.

Dwoskin, the man with a movie (or, in the 2000s, digital video) camera who gazes hungrily at the world, transcends his individual condition to become a figure of every kind of desire that falls into an abyss of solitude and uncertainty.

Like much of Dwoskin’s work, Oblivion (shot in his home) mixes lyrical abstraction with the hint of a narrative – which, in this case, is inspired by the 1928 erotic novel Irene’s Cunt by the Surrealist writer Louis Aragon, about a man whose fixation on the genitalia of a phantom woman leads to various elaborate, imaginary scenarios.

Dwoskin deploys seven women (including distinguished German actor Carola Regnier [1943-2011], prominent in his 1970s output) – all very different in age, nationality, personality and style – to represent this phantom, and uses himself as the haunted, immobile narrator-figure (who does not do much traditional narrating).

As often in Dwoskin’s work, the keenness of a liberating, sensual experience blends with the melancholia of fantasy, absence and loss – as well as the inevitable diminishing of the human vessel by time and illness.

Dwoskin takes the lurid clichés of literary and cinematic erotica – such as the glimpse of a woman in stockings through a half-open door – and transforms them, through a superb use of constant slow-motion and eerie pieces of found music, into a mode of personal expression close at every moment to the freest poetry or painting.

MORE Dwoskin: Intoxicated By My Illness (Part 1), Behindert, Trying to Kiss the Moon, I’ll Be Your Eyes, You’ll Be Mine, Outside In

© Adrian Martin June 2006