We At Her

Director: Cynthia Madansky
Performer: Deborah Berkson
Music: Toshi Reagon
8 mm ◊ 8 min.

Shot on Super 8mm, with the look and feel of a home movie, Cynthia Madansky’s We At Her embraces and cannily plays with the intimacy of the form. Layered, oblique, and scripted enough to prevent a strictly confessional reading, the film is nonetheless among the filmmaker’s most personal and autobiographical. Set to fleeting images of lead performer Deborah Berkson, and accompanied by Toshi Reagon’s spacious acoustic guitar score, the voiceover’s reflection on a relationship oscillates between the direct (“Do I want to marry her?”) and the poetic (“She scrawled across my eyes.”). While throughout her body of work Madansky has regularly grounded specific projects in her sense of self, her emotions, and her doubts, they’re frequently encountered alongside an engagement with the world at large. In We At Her the world is most often encountered—as the title suggests—through its physical manifestations of wind, rain, and ice. Eventually, however, as seen through images of barricaded doors that close out the world, the film offers a rare, resonant turn inward.