The decade-long collaboration between Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell has produced a fascinating cycle of films, including features and shorts, that goes some way in shaping a quasi-personal archive of Bohdanowicz’s life and family history. Most of the films stage encounters between Campbell’s recurring character, Audrey Benac, a Bohdanowicz alter-ego, with art, history, and archives in order to trace emotionally resonant links between the past and the present. Sometimes Bohdanowicz’s own family members appear in the films, extending her self-reflexive tendencies even further. Sometimes these family members are only memories, traces of lives on pages, in images or sounds. Even more abstractly, like in the short Point and Line to Plane, the memory of a deceased loved one seems to only appear symbolically, even supernaturally.
Most of these films are of modest scale and scope, allied to modest ambitions; the features rarely crack 70 minutes, during which the memories of a loved one, the observation of a stranger, or the interaction with an old musical recording are captured on fuzzy celluloid, on handheld cameras, or in soft interiors. But despite their modest dimensions, each film has an overwhelming source of emotion, from which, over the years, Bohdanowicz and Campbell have learned to tap with ever more subtle touches.
Measures for a Funeral, the latest collaboration between director and performer, takes on entirely new scope and ambition. Just looking at the runtime is enough to know the pair is entering uncharted territory. Across this new epic scale, Bohdanowicz loses nothing of, and in fact deepens, her fusion of the personal with the imagined to tell the story of a forgotten artist, the Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow, who was once Bohdanowicz’s grandfather’s instructor. What results is perhaps Bohdanowicz’s most transparently self-reflexive film, one that aims a direct, unambiguous gaze at the past, and even the supernatural.
The version of Audrey Benac we follow in Measures is researching an as-yet-unformed Ph.D. thesis about the underknown Parlow. Facing a time and funding crunch, Audrey is driven, as described by a friend she stays with in London, by an obsessive blindness. But rather than being obsessed with her thesis to the point of blindness, or forgetfulness, to other aspects of her life, the mode of Audrey’s blindness is obsessive, and the quality of the blindness avoidant rather than forgetful. She is so obsessed with cutting off her crumbling personal life from view because anything less than obsession would force her to confront it. In this case, her thesis is merely the object toward which she has directed her desperate attention.
Competing for Audrey’s attention is the looming presence of her ill mother, onto whom she dumps her bitterness over a scuppered career as a professional violinist in favor of motherhood. Audrey combats this guilt that isn’t hers by following Parlow’s life and career across the globe. Audrey confronts familiar thematic territory along the way: the neglected female artist, the assumed tradeoffs between work and family that women must face at some point in their lives among them. Campbell, to her credit, makes each discovery in relation to these questions feel like the very first. Her presence is singular, as we’ve come to expect in recent years across such films as Anne at 13,000 ft, Matt and Mara, and Family Portrait. An actor of immense emotional control, her strength, as seen in the three titles just mentioned, is in conveying inner turmoil through the most subtle physicalities. In Measures, like in many of her roles, she is tasked with tip-toeing the fine line between stoicism and disarray, which she makes apparent, ironically, through her ability to seemingly not make any expression at all. The great thrill of Measures is located in the moments she lets go of that control. Whether listening to a 1909 recording of Parlow on a wax cylinder in a London archive, nearly smashing her priceless 300-year-old violin, or tearfully watching the long-overdue Toronto performance of “Opus 28,” written for her by Johan Halverson, Campbell feels like an actor transformed.
Bohdanowicz’s films often eschew traditional narrative and emotional expression for something that verges on the experimental. A further tendency toward shooting on celluloid lends them an artifactual quality. As explorations into the past, they themselves resemble something plucked from an archive, like Parlow, ripe for rediscovery. In Measures, Bohdanowicz crafts something with a slightly more familiar shape, both narratively and visually. The digital wide-screen photography has a thoughtful, sometimes mannered quality that, rather than feeling lifeless, has a different kind of tactility you don’t find in her light and airy earlier works. This isn’t to say her previous films are lacking substance, but they operate in an entirely different mode to Measures, which is what makes this new film feel so exciting. It’s lost nothing of the mystery that sets her apart as one of the most thoughtful and emotionally intelligent filmmakers currently working, but gains a subtle accessibility that pays off immediately, and still rewards repeat viewings. If, like Audrey argues to a teacher at the Oslo Conservatory of Music, there is value in a minor work, the role of Measures as something seemingly more “major” is evidence of Bohdanowicz’s power in any mode she chooses.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 1.
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