Haint

The epic multichannel film HAINT was written and directed by the interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker Alyssa Taylor Wendt. The project, which has also shown as a multichannel installation with photographs and sculpture, speaks in complex terms about mortality, monuments, cycles of history and song, the origins of truth, the spiritual energy of objects and the roles that mythology and legacy play out in our daily lives. Filmed as three separate productions in Croatia, Detroit and Texas, the artist used tropes of improvisation, narrative memoir, abstract landscape, performance, layered sound design and ruin to provoke questions about how subjective multiple sources of visual information can be. Using dark and majestic imagery, she presents us with an epic journey of experimental cinema to speculate on these topical concerns. The left-hand channel, HAINT: SALVATION, was created in the Balkans, where the artist filmed socialist monuments and spomeniks that were constructed primarily as memorials. The futuristic, brutalist style of these monoliths are full of exceptional beauty in the Croatian and Bosnian countryside and are rich with significance for the Balkan people. The panoramic shots use the strength of the design with the existential vastness of the natural landscapes to convey a melancholy meditation on history and how we process our past. and languorous with composed soundtracks, this critical paean to power, death and monument has multiple connotations, both topically and in our collective consciousness. The center channel, HAINT: TRAUME, portrays a young man in Berlin trying to survive at the end of World War II. Speaking to our fear of death, this segment examines the forces behind our will to survive and what price that may carry. The line between darkness and light blurs and the only stable element is the character Mortality, played with great empathy and gothic beauty by the performance artist Joseph Keckler. The project was greatly inspired by the conflicting stories the artist’s dying father told her about living through the end of the war in Germany and subsequently moving to America. The entire piece was shot in Detroit as a stand in for post-war Berlin. HAINT: AGNOSIA completes the triptych on the far right channel. Filmed in Austin and San Antonio, Texas, this surreal segment of nonlinear improvisation plays out parodies of power, animism and how we deal with our own sense of history. Using local artists and musicians playing self-sufficient roles in both an abandoned armory and bathhouse, the artist gives us a loop of fictional history that has no definite beginning or end to illustrate cycles of time and how we mark importance through the relish or destruction of objects.

Year

2018

Director

Alyssa Taylor Wendt

Duration

37 min

Country

United States

Language

English