Book of Hours (Annie McDonell, 2019) (Patreon)

A brief film composed of gentle, quotidian gestures, Book of Hours is elegant in its subtlety. In the film, McDonell focuses on the domestic sphere, one of a number of possible "spaces" of activity that could have served as her primary stage. (Early in the film, we hear a voice reciting a litany of different phrases with the word "space" in them, an homage to a poem called "Species of Space" by Georges Perec. These words implicate all the locations Book of Hours does not occupy.) As a parent and child go through calendar reproductions of various artworks -- some abstract, others religious icons and stained glass windows -- we see the pair holding hands, manipulating objects, and eventually engaging in more direct forms of skin-to-skin contact, such as a diaper change and tender caresses.

A literal backdrop to this activity, eventually brought into the center of the field of play, is a monitor displaying clips from two early Yvonne Rainer films, Lives of Performers and Film About a Woman Who... These scenes are ones that emphasize Rainer's unique form of minimalist choreography, which is composed of movements derived from everyday life. Rainer, like others in the minimalist movement, wanted to strip virtuosity from dance, returning to it a concrete connection to ordinary, vernacular gesture. So in this respect, McDonell is using Rainer to move in the opposite direction. Her two performers, adult and child, are engaged in "normal" motions. But her film asks us to consider those movements as artistic interventions, not only at the scene of viewing but on the side of their production as well. Can creativity enliven or reimagine the relationships in our lives? Is the domestic sphere a space of radical movement? Book of Hours offers a breviary for physical and emotional labor, a performative documentation of the maternal art.