Grisaille

A Film by Ed Bowes

Text by Ed Bowes with poetry by Robert Duncan and Anne Waldman

Featuring Serena Chopra, HR Hegnauer, Gesel Mason, Tara Rynders, and Skye Hughes

44 minutes
2013

In Grisaille (which is a painterly and stained glass term referring to  the use of “gris”: gray) we encounter five figures — all women —  or as Bowes calls them “presenters” who seem to overlap and know one another. They sleep, read, write and contemplate their own consciousness and rehearse their mind grammar, and contemplate paintings, gender, a Robert Duncan poem that relates to a mother as a falconress. They exist in a mysterious landscape of texture, unfathomable shapes, and extraordinary color. The tones of painters Bonnard, deKooning, Picasso, as well as Renaissance art, has inspired the color and shape of Grisaille.

“Grisaille is almost like several dreams you wish you had. It is more in sync with real time, yet simultaneously illusory; full of color, light and shadow, not a wash, not shades of grey, more in the way of Woolf’s Moments of Being (here, women actually being). The film evokes and demands an intuitive response throughout, so I didn’t have to think mentally. I was restored by the view, as if I’d taken in something pure for the soul, something between art and the best interstices of human nature.” —Alystyre Julian

“What I’ve experienced in the work of Bowes, and in specific collaborations with him, is his insistence on the joyous qualities of vision (both internal and external) as one’s gaze interacts with, and ingests the phenomenal world — its beautiful shape and color, its parts of the body, its strange flesh and hair and clothing, and fragmented language.  His movies are always rigorous exploration of persons, objects and their puzzling and magical positions in a complex and curious reality that also seems soothing because of his deep respect for humanity’s humor and mystery. I am reminded of William Blake’s admonition to “look to the little ones, the minute particulars”. . . —Anne Waldman