A Woman Escapes (Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Çevik, and Blake Williams, 2022) (Patreon)

Disclosure of personal connections is always an odd thing when it comes to writing about experimental film. It is a small coterie, and I probably have some personal connection with about 80% of the avant-garde filmmakers I write about. But it does seem worth noting that one of the makers of A Woman Escapes, Blake Williams, is a good friend, and that I'm on nodding terms with the other two. While I don't think this really compromises my viewpoint on the film, I'll leave that for the reader to decide.

But it should be noted however that, in general, my judgment about any given film is affected -- I'd like to think deepened -- by my broader engagement with that maker's work. And that seems particularly significant here, because it's quite possible that I would not have found nearly as much in A Woman Escapes were I not able to see how it bounces off its makers' other work. In fact, I can see how the film might be a frustrating experience.

Most collective films either present the artists' work in discrete segments, like an omnibus, or try to meld the makers' styles into something rather seamless (cf. recent Ben Rivers / Ben Russell collabs). A Woman Escapes finds a third option. One could argue that the Bohdanowicz material, based on the filmmaker's onscreen avatar, Audrey Senac (Deragh Campbell) returning to Paris following the death of her friend Juliane (the subject of her 2017 film Maison du Bonheur), serves as a kind of wraparound narrative, since Audrey's stay at Juliane's apartment provides a kind of home-base for the work. It is, literally and figuratively, a stable address where the contributions by Çevik and Williams can arrive.

In fact, Audrey frequently serves as both an onscreen filmmaker and a viewer, first watching video letters from Çevik and 3D footage shot by Williams, and eventually reworking that material into her own edit. One of the maddening things about A Woman Escapes, but one that I came to admire, is how insistent it is on building itself up and breaking itself down. We struggle, along with Audrey, to connect the highly variant sounds and images we see passing before us. Instead of trying to merge into a single artistic statement, each artist's material -- even each individual scene -- refuses to cohere. Every element maintains its autonomy.

More than anything, this is a formal trope, one that uses various media to "unmake" the film before our eyes. Bohdanowicz's graint 16mm footage of Paris clashes with Çevik's crisp digital cinematography, and both collide with Williams' experimentation with 3D. (Note: I saw an anaglyph version.) In fact, every time one of Williams' passages comes on, there is a small logo of 3D glasses in the lower right hand corner, to alert the viewer to goggle up. On every level, A Woman Escapes draws attention to its making, its diverse materials, and the embodied activity of watching it.

In the final part of the film, we see Audrey on the computer editing and remixing material she received from Blake and Burak. This not only suggests that some "smoother" edit of A Woman Escapes might hypothetically exist, outside the runtime of the film we are watching. It also undoes the authorial / autobiographical framework that the epistolary format implies. Audrey re-records Burak's narration, or applies Blake's voice to her own images, so the primary disequilibrium of the film -- that Çevik and Williams "appear" as themselves while Bohdanowicz, as usual, is played as a character by an actress -- becomes more fraught, not less.

Lots of works in the experimental tradition have labored to make their viewer complicit in their construction. This is a fundamental tenet of structural film, for example. In a way, the para-narrative, dubiously biographical element of A Woman Escapes reminded me of Yvonne Rainer's early films, which were very much informed by structuralism but also insisted on the power of storytelling, particularly as relates to feminism. A Woman Escapes is in part about mourning and healing, but it seems to be "about" those experiences inasmuch as it suggests that wholeness -- what we think we lose when we undergo loss -- is a retroactive fiction, if not an illusion altogether. Bohdanowicz, Çevik, and Williams have made a film that demands a great deal from its audience, and part of this -- the root of the frustrations it may cause -- is a willingness to come out knowing even less than you did when you went in.