Trio

Comments on: **Trio: A New York Trilogy** (Eva Saks) ([|Confections]//, [|Colorforms], [|Date])//

//Comment by Mark Auslander:// I had in all honesty not thought of the first two of these three films (in reference to 9-11 prior to their grouping by Saks in the trilogy, but having the sequence culminate in //Date// certainly does put //Confection// and //Colorforms// in a new light. I can't help but think of Primo Levi's collection, "Moments of Reprieve": in the shadow of unspeakable tragedy, entirely unexpected vignettes of beauty and creativity may manifest themselves. //Confection// and //Colorforms// certainly can read without any reference to the legacies of September 11, as universal stories of the triumph of the unruly imagination in the face of monochromatic discipline (not to mention, visual praise poems to girls everywhere!). But these can also be read as celebrations to the alternate visions and vistas that are, perhaps against all odds, still enabled by the metropolis, even as it is increasingly governed by harsh regimes of surveillance,discipline and capital accumulation.

//Comment by Ellen Schattschneider:// One might also read the films through the lens of Marcell Mauss' classic anthropological essay, //The Gift//: each film culminates in or centers on a reciprocal gift transaction, in which the protagonist gives something back not merely to another person, but, in a sense, to the city as a whole. In //Confection,// the girl who has given the gift of her imaginary ballet performance is unexpectedly rewarded by applause from the homeless man (an angel of the city?) who has miraculousy seen her dance, and she in turn gives him her pastry. (As Mauss would predict, the gift is an extension of the persona of the giver: the tart's strawberry is of the same color as the girl's bright red coat.) In Colorforms, the grandfather and grand-daughter are bound together by giving one another the colored pigments, and the girl is further bound to the people of Queens by the exchange of further, happily tossed pigment. Finally, Date culminates in the greatest of gifts, an offering to the Dead of the city --an act which, not insigificantly, transforms the earlier mundane store-bought gifts (the candle, the flowers) into something profoundly poignant, even transcendant. Through this transformational sequence of gifts, the closing nightime urban shot, a repeat of the opening, emerges as more than just a location shot, becoming, at the end, a glimpse of the eternal city.

//Mark Auslander:// I'm struck by Ed Linenthal's thoughtful response to the films at yesterday's discussion: given the incessant volume of commentary and talk in the weeks leading up to this 9-11 anniversary, he deeply appreciates a film in which the protagonists don't speak at all. The most eloquent response to the tragedies might in fact be silence.

//Ellen Schattschneider comments:// At yesterday's viewing of the films, an alternate reading of Date occured to me. The man and woman are not lovers, who happen to stumble across the spontanous memorial, but are in fact brother and sister, who have arranged to meet in order to visit their dead parents, the African-American couple seen on the wall in one of the final shots. The audience is in effect "set up" to see the two people as out on a romantic "date" but in fact they have always had a date with the dead, and at the end the audience thus needs to rethink each moment of the film: the single flower had been judged insufficient by the woman, because she knew that her parents needed a much larger offering.

I recognize that everyone else in the discussion group was committed to the initial interpretation, seeing the couple as lovers who had been redirected from their self-centered tiff to an unexpected, transcendant encounter with the spontaneous shrine. I'm still most drawn to the brother-sister interpretation, but wonder if the two readings could perhaps co-exist, and if that ambiguity is key to the film: in the wake of unspeakable tragic loss, we enter into an extraordinary space, in which we are all at once lovers, siblings, and everything else --in which all human relationships are equally possible and equally impossible.


 * RETURN TO:** Eva Saks General Discussion