Last week I wrote a short reflection to accompany a screening of Moyra Davey's 2006 film Fifty Minutes and Horse Opera (2022), curated by Georgia Puiatti at Peepshow in Melbourne. I have been drawn to Davey's work ever since reading her book Index Cards when it came out around six years ago. That book exemplifies Davey's use of citation of other people's writing and work to shape her own view on things and, through that, weave a kind of self-mythology. Fifty Minutes shows Davey encountering passages of writing and photographs in her NYC apartment and there's real joy to be felt in seeing her think and move around various living spaces. I find writing about art and film in a way that is textural and observational much easier than any kind of academic writing, which you can probably tell from reading this...

My laptop is propped up on a pile of books on my coffee table and I am watching Moyra Davey's film Fifty Minutes. In an early segment of the film, Davey is sitting at a desk in her bedroom, looking into the camera and reciting a piece of writing about the management of food in her fridge. Davey reads aloud in a detached way as though she is trying to get to the core of her writing. The camera cuts three times as she makes attempts to recall and locate the words, before going on to liken the gradual emptying out of her fridge to the time-lapsed decay of animal carcasses in Peter Greenaway's 1985 film A Zed and Two Noughts. In other segments, her camera pans around various rooms as though it is trying to work out what to focus on. There is an unmade bed and a rifled-through chest of drawers. Other images show Davey sorting through an inventory of notes and envelopes; searching for something, and this is how the film progresses. 

This searching can be felt in Davey's frequent citation of the work of other artists and writers. In Fifty Minutes, this search takes a physical form as the camera pores over, like a finger across a page, annotations from essays and newspaper articles. Davey picks out photographic sentences from a literary review by Vivian Gornick that describe the absence of nostalgia in literary culture after the advent of 9/11. Phrases such as 'a stillness beyond pain, fear, or agitation' stick in the mind as Davey pauses after reading and repositions the camera to give her own reflection on Gornick's piece. There is space to breathe and piece together thoughts in the silence between Davey's recitations. When the camera silently trails over her kitchen table, I feel drawn to the zucchini flowers and rosemary cuttings placed together in a glass, which now feel suffused in melancholy and solitude. It is this play between citation and the present moment, the gradual ebb-and-flow of images and feeling building over time, that gives Davey's film a kind of magic quality. 

Davey continues to play with temporality by examining a book containing the eleven photographs that are ritualistically burned in Hollis Frampton's 1971 structural film nostalgia. While lingering on each image, Davey gives a concise description of the film and how Michael Snow's regretful narration permeates nostalgia. Davey captures the essence of nostalgia when she says that it is 'regret over things never said and amends not made.' It was strange to see the photographs immortalised in the book, without the original narration, and I somehow felt a stronger sense of loss for the images than in Frampton's film. On this unsettling note, Davey finishes with a quote from the narration: 'I think I should never dare to make another photograph again' and then the camera pans up to a view of a blank white wall. After the fifty minutes came and went, I closed my laptop and looked across to the fridge in the corner of my cramped bedsit. 

I took this in Wales