“What is a poetic cinema? That’s a question I’ve been thinking about, a question yet to be answered. It can’t just be that it’s not linear. It has to propose a different kind of language and a different kind of thought. And as a result, logic,” offered the American artist and educator Cathy Lee Crane when I recently caught up with her from several time zones away to learn what she’s been up to since we last spoke in 2018 about The Manhattan Front (her debut narrative feature inspired by a bizarre true tale involving a WWI German saboteur, ACLU founding member Elisabeth Gurley Flynn, and the Industrial Workers of the World).
The self-proclaimed “decidedly nonlinear filmmaker” also happens to be a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow whose over two decades of work, much of which melds archival footage with staged material, was presented back in 2015 as part of the American Original Now series at the National Gallery of Art. And the multimedia vet’s award-winning films (including the intriguingly titled “experimental biographies” Pasolini’s Last Words and Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil) have likewise played far and wide overseas; from the BFI to the Viennale, to the Festival du Nouveau Cinema and the Cinematheque Francais, and the Arsenal Cinema in Berlin.
Which is where Crane is now ensconced, having become the latest recipient of the (Goethe-Institut sponsored) Harun Farocki Residency. All throughout the month of July HaFI is hosting several events to showcase the fruits of Crane’s current herculean labor – starting with the most epic of her projects, Drawing the Line (July 15-24). “I’ve always thought of these 14 channels in Drawing the Line as each seeding a chapter in a documentary series – really they could even be smaller profiles for Field of Vision or The New Yorker – looking at the contemporary lives of people in the borderlands, communities in the contact zone,” Crane went on to explain about this multichannel work in progress that confronts the legacy of the mid-19th century US/Mexico Border Survey Commission (and its maddeningly arbitrary determination that literally drew a line in the sand across an entire continent). “Contact zone” being a phrase that the linguist and critical theorist “Mary Louise Pratt spent a lot of time thinking through,” Crane continued. “(It’s) about difference, and finding ways to coexist without assimilation and compromise.”
“I’ve also been thinking through this particular line – or the problem of lines of territory in particular – that Deleuze and Guattari bring up in On the Line, a book I’ve been obsessed with since the 80s,” she enthused. “To think through deterritorialization, and ways in which thinking itself need not be stuck in a comparative conflict, obstacle-driven logic of subject and object; that we can build out new ways of reasoning.” Which for Crane is not all theoretical. “You’re really seeing it in the art world everywhere right now,” she added. “Decentralization is necessary. We have to move beyond or outside of the kind of hierarchical structure of curatorial king-making.”
An artist’s job continues to be, I think, to never let up
And the spirit of the collective is likewise front and center in the collaborative film program (X)-trACTION (screening July 29), which features Crane’s 2022 short film Terrestrial Sea. As for her own relationship to the concept, Crane explained, “Personally, I think about extraction in terms of the archive – in terms of you go into the field and you ask a question. You then take an answer. And if you record that, you are taking it away with you. And what is that cultural practice, and what are its implications? I mean, this has not been fully answered.”
“For one’s practice is constantly modified as you confront your own sort of ethical blindspots, or formal inheritances that are themselves part of an extractive logic,” she stressed. “Language is insidious that way. We inherit a whole host of naming processes, ways of framing things that are repetitions for reifications of racism, sexism, capitalism – all the “isms.” An artist’s job continues to be, I think, to never let up. Because if you’re honest in what you’re doing you’re going to confront your own complicity in the problems you want to try to unpack and visit conceptually, speculatively.”
As for the future of her “speculative history” artwork, and of Drawing the Line specifically, it’s “the kind of project that may never be over. It’s a Borges library when you think about iterability, and how many ways in which the exact same material can be utilized or considered.”
In other words, Crane’s quest for knowledge, in all its multifaceted forms, may never truly end.
Image: Harun Farocki Institut