In My Language, Amanda Baggs (1980-2020)
Found through an Another gaze piece:
‘Learning how to be available for work like Baggs’s has important political implications: it suggests that as an audience we can move away from conventional narratives - with their dependence on linear time, certain body types, gestures and prescribed emotions - towards other types of storytelling that do not necessarily follow those conventions. Since storytelling is one of the main technologies we as humans have to make worlds, this opens us up to new, exciting possibilities: not just in how we think or how we decide what a person is or can do, but also in how we relate to objects and our natural environment’. - Julian Gatto
I don’t know if this is an inappropriate comparison to make but this statement really brings to mind Josephine Decker’s films, especially relating to your environment + objects being linked to opening up who gets to be a ‘real’ person. I’m thinking about Madeleine’s Madeline and how people seemed to measure the extent of Madeleine’s mental illness through their own discomfort and ability to read or control it. The environment shit is something do with how hyper sensitive the sound is, the close moving frames, how you are constantly experiencing and not watching. Maybe I need to pipe down but I think there’s something in there about new types of storytelling that reflect without judgement different ways of experiencing the world. Mental illness is painful as fuck but worse when people mistranslate and misread whats goin on and see it as reason to take away your autonomy. Autism is different but that constant misinterpretation must be fucking exhausting. All power to Baggs for this beautiful film. Rest in Peace man
