I first conceived of Six Lives after reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse five summers in a row, and living in New York, France, and Morocco in communities of writers, artists and translators. Woolf ‘s essay « The Cinema » offers a critique of cinema as a potentially superficial medium, and I wanted to achieve the depth of her work, and of poetic thinking, precisely in the cinematic medium. We gathered a cluster of six writers, in various combinations, over a period of several years, in six locations, each time with a different Woolf text in question. What gets charted is a movement from abstract thinking and the division of the body into parts, into a poetically embodied cinema where mind and body are in synchronicity. An opening.
I first conceived of Six Lives after reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse five summers in a row, and living in New York, France, and Morocco in communities of writers, artists and translators. Woolf ‘s essay « The Cinema » offers a critique of cinema as a potentially superficial medium, and I wanted to achieve the depth of her work, and of poetic thinking, precisely in the cinematic medium. We gathered a cluster of six writers, in various combinations, over a period of several years, in six locations, each time with a different Woolf text in question. What gets charted is a movement from abstract thinking and the division of the body into parts, into a poetically embodied cinema where mind and body are in synchronicity. An opening.
© 2019 Sarah Riggs