Parts & Labour (Julie Murray, 2020) (Patreon)

Another compelling answer to the problem of how to produce new work during a quarantine, Julie Murray's latest film combines curiosity with improvisation, choosing to look more carefully at the objects that are close at hand. Murray, an Irish filmmaker and artist who has been making significant contributions to the avant-garde since the 1980s, is someone who hasn't gotten the critical attention her work deserves. Of course, one could probably say this about almost anyone working in experimental film. But Murray emerged on the scene around the same period as Su Friedrich, Abigail Child, Leslie Thornton, and Ericka Beckman. Despite exhibiting the same kind of intersections between feminist engagement and formal exploration, Murray's films have often failed to garner the same degree of exposure, which is a shame.

Her latest, Parts & Labour, will immediately remind many viewers of Ken Jacobs' 1971 structural classic Tom, Tom the Piper's Son. Like that analytical film-object, Parts & Labour consists of an artist working manually with another, preexisting piece of film. In this case, Murray is using a 35mm Shawscope print of a Chinese martial arts film, one that looks like it's from the late 70s or early 80s. (I don't recognize the original film. Anyone know it? Carlson? Burns? Abrams?) Much of the action of Parts & Labour entails Murray rapidly pulling the filmstrip through the gate, resulting in a blurred, frameline-punctuated facsimile of the film's original action. Aside from the frequent freeze-frames, this movie is reduced to a smeary, Impressionistic haze, its action boiled down to pure gesture.

Her film is segmented into discrete passages, and the whole thing lasts around 25 minutes. (Parts & Labour is silent, apart from the sync sounds outside Murray's studio, such as traffic and birds.) Although the film gets a little baggy toward the end, what we find is that this way of watching this particular film distills it down to its directorial essence. Every edit is a whiplash thrust into another world, since the removal of diegetic cues turns every shot into a kind of cyclotron, a meticulously controlled spatial arena through which bodies slide and whirl. As the title suggests, Murray shows us precisely what this movie is by taking it apart and seeing what makes it run.

Parts & Labour can be viewed here.