Platform for experimental and anthropological film,
sound, and landscape cinema.
sound, and landscape cinema.
In Focus:
Marion Scemama
I had this camera that wasn’t just an object but an extension of David’s mind through my eyes and my arm… a way of pushing away the growing feeling of death surrounding us.
— Marion Scemama
Marion Scemama is a French filmmaker and photographer who moved to New York City in 1981 to encounter its underground art scene. She began frequenting the legendary Pier 34, an abandoned industrial hangar which became an informal (and illegal) art venue and a cruising spot, and quickly part of the city’s art scene. There, she sparked an intense friendship with artist, writer and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz, which led to her closely documenting his life and work until his death from an AIDS-related illness in 1992. Scemama’s body of work encompasses narrative films, video diaries, and documentation of Wojnarowicz’s performances. It is marked by a strong impulse for experimentation and the ability to grasp the radical and emancipatory spirit of an era marked by the AIDS epidemic, poverty and homophobia.
Central to the programme is the mid-length experimental hybrid film Relax Be Cruel, which combines elements of narrative and nonfiction, and was shot at Pier 34. Filmed in 1983, partially lost, and then re-edited by Scemama in 2023, the film unfolds through the perspective of a punk squatter who witnesses the many lives which revolve around the warehouse. A black and white hypnagogic vision, the film incorporates experimental performances and installations, and close observations of bodies and their relationships with architecture, all unified by the idiosyncrasy of the place, which was soon after demolished by the city authorities.
Scemama’s works made in collaboration with David Wojnarowicz are driven by intimate friendship and a desire for the reconfiguration of relations. This is evident in her later work Summer ‘89 (filmed in 1989 and edited in 2021), a video diary made while travelling to upstate New York with David Wojnarowicz and Scemama’s partner François Pain. The three pass a digital camcorder from hand to hand, experimenting with apparent spontaneity and with a new medium, zooming in and out on one another. Made with a deceptively light touch, the film expresses a desire for freedom; a queering of the classic road movie genre and its motif of escape from normative society. It is a manifestation of love, tenderness, intimacy, and friendship, but above all an affirmation of life in the face of Wojnarowicz’s AIDS diagnosis, which he had learned about shortly before the trip.
Short videos If I Had A Dollar, Last Night I Took A Man and When I Put My Hands On Your Body feature Wojnarowicz’s writing revolving around sexuality, the AIDS epidemic and state’s active role in murdering its citizens and weaponising the virus to reinforce the conservative agenda.
Marion Scemama’s films are presented with newly commissioned captions for the d/Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing designed by Carefuffle, a disabled and queer-led working group.