Printed Motion Picture Acquisitions
Friday Morning Coffee Credits
Archivist Obsesions
Eric Stephanian
Micro unit still reel psychodoc. Facial study cut from dormant Paris footage, resurfaced twelve years late. Compilation of eight fixed shots per spread of female faces in doubt, dead frames pulled and cropped to print from the original raw takes. Original duplication batch of hundreed plus ten AC pulls. Printed in house. Limited run. Available.
ISBN 979-12-82682-02-2
Limited Run 10/3AC
Print Size 10/15
It is about the “female doubt”, a quiet presence that seems to reside, almost unfailingly, behind a “woman’s gaze,” the “gaze of doubt,” a gentle, eternal questioning of whether goodness is ever quite as pure as it appears, long regarded by men, inclined toward certainty and firmer convictions, as something utterly inconvenient; and yet it is this soft, persistent inclination to doubt and to look again, to hesitate, to consider possibilities beyond what is immediately proclaimed as right or wrong, that has drawn civilisation forward, urged families toward wiser choices, and encouraged men, who have historically been denied the indulgence of second thoughts, to temper their reassuring certainties; for when that subtle “gaze of doubt” meets ours, reading us more deeply than we are accustomed to being read, it introduces a most disarming awareness that certainty may not, after all, be the highest virtue, and in this way the quiet questioning, so easily dismissed, proves itself not only essential but, in the most remarkable sense, wonderfully contagious, as, unable to read “female faces,” through that contagious gaze we question our certainty, diminish it, and thus open our minds to the new…