Christiana Perschon: Two Films

Sekundenarbeiten (2021)

Within the first three minutes, the arrangement of image to sound is made clear: the recorded voice of Lieselott Beschorner (born 1927) will be accompanied by a black screen, while the images of this artist at work in her studio will be rendered in silent black-and-white.

Austrian filmmaker Christiana Perschon continues her creative documentation of female artists (as in She is the Other Gaze [2018]) with a sensitivity to gesture, texture, rhythm, materials. “The line unfolds into something particular,” remarks Beschorner, and the same applies to the film’s capturing and assembling of light, movement and sound.

Bildwerden (2022)

As artists grow older and become more fragile, they face the poignant, painful prospect of no longer being able to perform the same gestures that previously enabled them to create.

The first shot of this film frames the Austrian artist Isolde Maria Joham (who died in October 2022 at the age of 90) off-centre, her hands shaking. Her large-scale paintings are nearby.

Perschon, in this 10-minute work, allows Joham a new gesture: to climb the steps of a stair-frame and pose, smiling in front of her signature canvases. OK, she trembles a little; but so does (as we see) a bird alighting on a branch, or the stairs themselves; nothing in this world is fixed rigid. As the filmmaker says to Isolde, happily: “Now you’ve outgrown the frame”.

© Adrian Martin September 2021 / 26 August 2022 (+ update)