Artforum on the Films of Stephanie Gray

At Artforum, Amy Taubin writes about New York poet and filmmaker Stephanie Gray, whose three-evening retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, “Super 8mm Poetics: The Films of Stephanie Gray,” "coincides with the publication by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs of her second poetry collection, Shorthand and Electric Language Stars." "Poetry informs the place from which she speaks as a moving-image maker and her camera-eye informs her words," writes Taubin.

Like the places and people she has filmed, Super 8 has all but disappeared. Most of the filmmakers who briefly explored it turned decades ago to video and digital technologies. But for Gray, whose work is defined by its stubbornness, Super 8 is the artisanal medium where she celebrates handmade imperfection and mourns its passing.

The third program in the series is devoted almost entirely to short films that memorialize —although that’s too grand a word for Gray’s images—places that made daily life in New York unique until they fell victim to so-called gentrification: More Bread Forever (2004) shot the day before Zito’s Bakery on Bleecker Street closed; I Bought the Last Four Bagels at Jon Vie Pastries, New Year’s Eve 2004 (2004); Magic Couldn’t Save Magic Shoes (2010); You Know They Want to Disappear Hell’s Kitchen as Clinton (2010). The titles are more straightforward—punchier even—than the film images, where Gray’s deliberate refusal to focus her lens except for brief scattered moments makes the places that one took for granted ’til they were gone look as if they were already misted memories even before they breathed their last. All of Gray’s films suggest the difficulty of focusing on anything—even what we most love or hate.

The paradox is that these extremely fragile films comprise a cinema of personal and political grief and outrage that is unsparing of its audience. Gray speaks from the position of a working-class, lesbian, and severely hearing-impaired woman, a voice from the margins that refuses to be silent, indeed finds no justification for marginalization of any kind. Gray makes no attempt to seduce a potential audience, although several films in this retro are ironically humorous in their wordplay, most notably Close Yr Hearing for the Cap(Shuns) (2000). Her voice-overs are repetitive in pitch and rhythm and reedy in timbre—they reflect the way she hears her own voice and the voices of others, but more crucially they express a struggle to be heard at all.

A must-see. Read more at Artforum.