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sound, and landscape cinema.
Essays
Notes on Relation and Resonance:
Marion Scemama and David Wojnarowicz
Essay on
marion scemama’s work
Screened during FIELD RECORDINGS 6
Author kari robertson
copy editor harriet foyster
Published july 5, 2026
Screened during FIELD RECORDINGS 6
Author kari robertson
copy editor harriet foyster
Published july 5, 2026
Watching the films of Marion Scemema with the invitation to write about them, I feel acutely aware that my entry point to her work is via her close friend and collaborator David Wojnarowicz. Wojnarowicz's work (visual art, writing, and activism) has not left me since I discovered it some years ago. He is the kind of exceptionally charismatic figure that you want to grasp, to quote, to amplify. I am concerned, knowing this, that I will focus too much on Wojnarowicz as a subject, and not enough on Scemema herself as a filmmaker.
Still from summer ‘89 (2021)
The first of Scemema’s films screened within Field Recordings is, however, not a direct collaboration with Wojnarowicz. Relax Be Cruel (1983) is a narrative fiction film, shot in black and white 16mm at Pier 34, an abandoned warehouse in New York. Throughout this film, Scemama’s background as a photographer is apparent in her granularly detailed depictions of sunlight in the warehouse: it reflects off the water and bounces around the open empty structures; it pierces holes in rusting fences and casts rhythmic shadows. Light and wind occupy space from which human bodies are absent. The film is witness to the frightening beauty of this strange environment, an end of the world just outside of a super city. Pier 34 is somewhat timeless; it is hard to know how long it has been abandoned or for what it has been used. It has the dangerous feeling of possibility; a liminal space where things can go unwitnessed.
The characters that populate the film embody and enflesh this feeling of possibility. The narrative ostensibly depicts a young woman who is squatting the building over the course of one summer. We see her walk, smoke, eat food straight out of cans, and enter into encounters with others who visit the pier. Through the squatter’s eyes, we witness a series of vignettes in which characters are introduced: a dancer effortlessly climbs the walls and balances on the beams of the abandoned building; men have sex by the water; a menacing salvager hangs pigeons from a noose; and club kids smoke and chatter, seemingly unimpressed by the warehouse. These characters embody atmospheres and attitudes rather than allude to fully fleshed people. The longest scene is of a bondage photo shoot inside the warehouse. The camera moves between the squatter's point of view, depicting the scene itself, and an external position, in which we witness the squatter watching the shoot unfold through a hole in the warehouse wall.
Still from relax be cruel (1983)
Is the film—or Scemama herself—voyeuristic? In a Q&A after the screening an audience member asks her this and she says no, she isn’t. The most eroticised gaze within the film is directed not at the bodies but toward the building itself. There is a palpable excitement in documenting a structure such as this one, where behaviour is not policed, commercialised, or pre-determined. There is a sometimes frightening freedom here. Scemema depicts it with a romantic, unjudgemental, and generous honesty. Here I am reminded of Wojnarowicz, who throughout his work strove to break down and find alternatives to what he saw as the hypocritical and false ‘manufactured world’. Could this be such a place? Wojnarowicz had not yet met Scemama, but it was he who opened up the warehouse for artists to create and informally show works there.
Like the characters of the film, Wojnarowicz and Scemema each see something in this odd interstitial space and animate it with their bodies, friends, and works. After Relax Be Cruel stops shooting, Pier 34 is demolished, Scemema and Wojnarowicz meet and have an instant, magnetic connection. They become close friends and have long breakfast dates together. They also become prolific collaborators; Wojnarowicz typically authors and narrates, while Scemama translates his words to film.
In Scemama’s short film Last Night I Took a Man (1989), Wojnarowicz performs a text that moves from an anonymous sexual encounter to a reflection on the media frenzy and popular representation of AIDS in the 1980s. Alongside Wojnarowicz’s full body performing to camera, Scemema creates a video collage of images from his work and her own, many of which depict death or sex. This montage becomes a visual language that escalates in tandem with Wojnarowicz’s rising tone.
In If I Had A Dollar (1989), Scemama documents a live performance of Wojnarowicz’s text Untitled (Hujar Dead) at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in 1989. From what we see she must be sitting in the audience, camera directed at the small stage where he stands. Wojnarowicz, grieving his ex-partner and mentor Peter Hujar, and with a recent AIDS diagnosis himself, expresses visceral and eloquent rage. Scemema seems to respond with her camera in real time, zooming in and out on Wojnarowicz, making him loom larger as he becomes louder, capturing how rage inflames his face and possesses his body.
still from when i put my hands on your body (1989)
Wojnarowicz describes the unbearable pressure he experiences as his rage and grief can no longer be contained within his finite body. ‘There’s a thin line…,’ he repeats, ‘between the inside and the outside… between thought and action. [...] I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg1.’ A blood-filled egg: it evokes both vulnerability and horror. It is an image that holds the very paradox that Wojnarowicz lives as a person with AIDS: he is at once stigmatised and ignored, his infected body is regarded as a dangerous weapon, and yet left to deplete as an unworthy victim. As an ACT UP activist, he already uses his own body as a tool of non-violent resistance: to block roads, occupy clinics, scream and shout and disrupt. He ponders what it would mean for him now to let the egg crack, to make poison darts of his own blood as a fitting weapon against politicians who wilfully facilitate such mass social murder.
When I Put My Hands On Your Body (1989) once more combines Wojnarowicz’s spoken word with Scemema’s filmmaking gaze. We hear his deep baritone recite a devastating erotic lament as Scemama’s camera moves across him and another man sensually touching and kissing one another. Wojnarowicz’s words grapple with the miraculous poetry of flesh in all its unlikeliness. The voice marvels at how the body of a lover fits in the curvature of the hand, how the same body once was embryo and will be dust, but most of all how it can be here right now, and so full. In the final scenes, strobe lights punctuate the film into a series of distinct frames. We see mouth and hands on body. Is the video slowed to prolong the presence of this flesh a little more? ‘If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth, to this present time, I would.’ But he can’t, we can’t; time is moving through these frames. ‘It makes me weep to feel the history of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of so much loss.’2 As water pours down on Wojnarowicz, his lover disappears.
In these films, Scemama sensitively captures and conveys the most well known version of Wojnarowicz: the eloquent, sharp, defiant activist, whose work and words still carry such relevance today.
Summer 89 (2021) offers a different presentation. Shot over one summer spent in upstate New York, Wojnarowicz, Scemama, and her partner and editor François Pain take turns filming one another with a borrowed video camera. They drive, they swim, they dance, play, drink wine, and talk. This is a different Wojnarowicz; a softer, warmer, more playful one, and we see his body when it is un-weaponised and unguarded. Scemama also allows herself to be seen; she steps from behind the camera and into the frame. In this film, the camera is a relational tool and toy. In one scene, Wojnarowicz and Scemama are in a boat together. He films her as she sits topless and tanned with oar in hand. As he offers her gentle instructions she flirts and giggles, blows kisses to the camera and bites her lip, and he encourages her with delight in his voice. They are giddy. Through the camera, we are allowed to see what they see in each other. It is not only Scemama who is besotted with Wojnarowicz, their reciprocal chemistry is palpable.
still from summer ‘89 (2021)
The film is punctuated by a series of improvised monologues by Wojnarowicz. These play with speculation and storytelling, in which Scemama’s camera colludes with Wojnarowicz’s voice. In one monologue, he narrates from an encyclopedia of big cats to the house cat, as though it were a family photo album: ‘That’s your mummy,’ he points to a cheetah ‘...that’s your mummy after she was caught by The White people, they put her in jail where all the people came to look at her.’3 In another scene, Wojnarowicz sits in the car while a green beetle crawls over his hand. The camera follows the insect as it moves around his fingers and navigates a forest of arm hairs. Wojnarowicz ponders aloud:
I wonder what this little bug does in the world, what his job is, and if this little bug dies, if the world feels it? Does something get misplaced? Do people speak language differently if this bug dies? Does the world get a little lighter in rotation?4
The hand rotates, the bug crawls around again. The tone is whimsical, funny, tender, and cruel. Through their collaborative works, Scemama and Wojnarowicz retain a remarkable ability to hold contradictions. This bug is both insignificant and also might change the Earth’s rotation if it were to disappear. Surrounded by death, they continue to depict the vital stuff of life. Wojnarowicz’s rage is fuelled by his gentleness. Scemama’s gaze depicts these contradictions without attempting to resolve them.
In one of the last scenes in the film, the friends drive back to New York: an intertitle on screen reads ‘5 hour drive. Silence and tension.’ To the soundtrack of the Doors’ ‘The End’, we see gigantic steel infrastructure, cars, and motorways. The ‘manufactured world’ suddenly invades and unsettles the lush, expansive green and sparkling lakes of the rest of the film. Something has changed.
In the last scene, we are back on the lake with Scemema and Wojnarowicz. She is filming him this time. His voice comes over the scene, ‘I feel really empty right now, I don’t think there’s a lot I can say.’5 Wojnarowicz proceeds to express his ambivalence about being documented now for a time after his own death. Here is another contradiction, this time one that Wojnarowicz struggles to hold. As someone who has spent most of his life feeling worthless, he finds himself now grieving, chronically ill and increasingly celebrated as an artist:
And again, it’s like so what? How many thousands of people died of AIDS now, how many documentations do we have about these sick dying faggots sitting in a room, going through whatever shit that he’s going through, and say oh look he has rage and oh yes he has fear, oh yes he has a mind and oh yes he created these things. And some people think they’re beautiful, other people think they’re full of shit.6
In the face of thousands of deaths at the hands of governmental neglect, Wojnarowicz the dying activist rails against Wojnarowicz and Scemama the artists. He asks, is what we really need more documentation of the humanity of the dehumanised? It doesn’t matter how eloquent we are if no one who can make change is listening. This question resonates hauntingly with our present day; our age of abundant documentation and yet dwindling political agency.
Thinking back to Pier 34, Scemama and Wojnarowicz meet in a restless striving for freedom and find something of this in each other. They both are drawn to unconventional spaces, people, and practices that escape the repressive pretences of the status quo. Their shared sensibility is perhaps a capacious curiosity and an unyielding openness to what the world is and could be.
Scemama chooses to sacrifice a neat ending of Summer 89 in favour of embracing Wojnarowicz in his cracking, spilling complexity. She prioritises relation over resolution. In the final shot, Scemama and Wojnarowicz meet in an unflinchingly honest but loving gaze. It’s a devastating ending for the film, but a fitting one.
Kari Robertson, 2026
footnotes
1 If I Had A Dollar by David Wojnarowicz, camera Marion Scemama (1989, 3:46 min.)
2 When I Put My Hands On Your Body by David Wojnarowicz, camera Marion Scemama (1989, 4:29 min.)
3 Summer 89 by Marion Scemama (2021, 25 min.)
4 Summer 89 by Marion Scemama (2021, 25 min.)
5 Summer 89 by Marion Scemama (2021, 25 min.)
6 Summer 89 by Marion Scemama (2021, 25 min.)