Kersti Jan Werdal introduces the Los Angeles premiere of i cannot now recall, and Lake Forest Park.
"When making Lake Forest Park, it was an internal negotiation to decide what should stay in or be left out. My memories, the internal archive — I can’t ever know what really happened, or didn’t. Or should I say believe to know. There’s much that’s inaccessible, to reappear later in life, or not. I don’t know. Carving these faded memories into film though, they’re material now.
i cannot now recall is not meant to be confused with a portrait, despite the script’s source material. Editorializing maybe .. 900 dreams written down by a single person that spans decades, into a brief selection. Ownership is then displaced with a new dreamer - a double distancing takes place. Although formally quite different, I think how memory functions could be seen as one way these two works speak to each other.
When I shared the film with YR she said ‘that’s the nature of dreams; they disappear from memory as soon as they’re recorded — and certainly if they’re not written down’. What does she mean by recorded .. into memory? Or recorded onto the page? I’m not certain.
It all sort of reminds me of editing - the memory bank, the archive. With editing you see something [you feel it really] then you make a choice. You choose to make a cut - something is left behind, and another is kept, privileged. Like the archive - like our memories. And next, you decide which precise moment should go next to another .. and when it all is decided on and fixed, a transmutation takes place.
end the occupation in Palestine. ceasefire now."
“You can’t teach people how to think, how to use their eyes and ears – or how to make effective politics for that matter – they either can or they can’t – you can pass on a spark of something, show them a concrete operation, but not much more.”
i cannot now recall
In i cannot now recall, Kersti Jan Werdal presents a collection of Yvonne Rainer’s dreams, selected by the filmmaker from Rainer’s journals. Through choice and abstraction, Werdal produces a shared psychic landscape that is as expansive as it is anxious.
Lake Forest Park
Filmed on location in Northwest Washington, Lake Forest Park (un)winds through a coming-of-age tale of a group of friends dealing with the secret of a classmate’s death. The film explores collective and individual grief tinged with existential confusions.
Kersti Jan Werdal is a filmmaker and editor from Seattle, Washington. She lives in Los Angeles with her dog Rita.
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