Nina Danino

Stabat Mater opens and closes with two sung laments, then launches into a breathless torrent of words and phrases, a re-reading of the eternal feminine of Joyce’s Ulysses, which echoes the exultant/feverish swoop of the camera through a Mediterranean landscape

Spanish popular copla songs and their mighty female singers are the focus of this evocative film.

Venice is empty, the protagonist walks from the grand sights and interiors into the backstreets, a figure at twilight walking the alley ways and into the dark night to meet the Devil at dawn. The film follows a path via the remnants of Romanticism and Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil in search of beauty, opulence exotic pleasure and lovers, by Venice. It follows the bohemian idea of escapism as a form of radical resistance and as an act of sensuality in the Director’s own cinematic female gaze.

In Greenwich Park, London two lovers stroll and talk about love, their relationship and the making of a film in Venice. The Venice film is shot on 16mm. Venice at dawn is empty and a protagonist sits at the empty San Marco Piazza, it glides in a detached manner from the grand sights and facades and interiors of Palazzos into the backstreets. In guilded interiors and painted ceilings, as the winter afternoon light weakens in a soporific atmosphere, she lays in dark interiors with frescoes of Antiquity. Like the Risen, at twilight she walks the alleyways and into the dark to meet the Devil at dawn. Featuring the actor Pietro Fanelli – the Devil makes a fleeting but impactful appearance, the protagonist offers herself to his gaze and touch.

A film on Saint Teresa that leads us through an unnervingly authentic extreme state of religious and sexual ecstasy. With the central image of the statue of Saint Teresa of Avila in Rome, together with glimpses of colour-saturated flower gardens, the Crucifixion and Baroque plasterwork, we listen to the gulping and frenetically clipped voice of the ‘saint’ pouring out her rapturous lament, attempting to express the unsayable. The film’s soundtrack combines a spoken voice by Nina Danino and performed vocals by New York experimental singer Shelley Hirsch.

Gibraltar as a real place – and an imagined geography and history. In the first part, the camera travels around West Berlin picking out touristic monuments and describing them in terms of their significance to military history… In the second half (in which the commentary also charts the escalation of land frontier sea and air restrictions), a ferry leaves a quayside and sails into the open Strait. It is an image of freedom but also a melancholy image of parting.