Field Recordings Day 3 – In Focus: Marion Scemama

IN FOCUS: MARION SCEMAMA

One ticket gives access to the full programme: a screening of Scemama’s films, a short break, and a masterclass with the filmmaker. For more on the works and their maker, please visit www.fieldrecordings.org.

Relax Be Cruel
by Marion Scemama, 40 min, 16mm transferred to digital, USA / France, 1983/2023, English with English SDH
Set at the legendary Pier 34, an abandoned Manhattan hangar that became an illegal art venue and cruising spot. Filmed in 1983, partly lost, and re-edited by Scemama in 2023, this hybrid fiction follows a punk squatter who witnesses the many lives passing through the warehouse, a black and white hypnagogic vision of bodies, performances and architecture, in a place the city soon demolished.
Content note: flashing lights / strobe effects; strong sexual references

When I Put My Hands On Your Body
by David Wojnarowicz (camera by Marion Scemama), 4 min 30s, 8mm transferred to Beta and digital, USA, 1989, English with English SDH
Wojnarowicz’s silkscreen text becomes a tentative homoerotic act, filmed by Scemama in sensual close-ups of male bodies, an all-consuming sense of intimacy and desire that echoes through time.
Content note: flashing lights / strobe effects; mild sexual references

Summer 89
by Marion Scemama, 25 min, video transferred to digital, USA / France, 1989/2021, English with English SDH
A video diary made on a trip to upstate New York with David Wojnarowicz and Scemama’s partner François Pain. The three pass the camera from hand to hand, queering the road movie in a film of tenderness and friendship that is, above all, an affirmation of life in the face of Wojnarowicz’s AIDS diagnosis.

If I Had A Dollar
by David Wojnarowicz (camera by Marion Scemama), 3 min 45s, Beta transferred to digital, USA, 1989, English with English SDH
A recording of Wojnarowicz’s prose poetry performance, also known as Untitled (Hujar Dead), written for his late mentor and former partner Peter Hujar. A stark critique of the American healthcare system and the state’s inaction during the AIDS pandemic.

Last Night I Took A Man
by Marion Scemama and David Wojnarowicz, 4 min 30s, 8mm transferred to digital, USA, 1989, English with English SDH
A collage of Wojnarowicz’s spoken word performance with other footage and illustrations. His writing centres queer male experience and the stigmas spread by the media in 1980s USA.
Content note: flashing images; mentions of illness; mild sexual references

All of Marion Scemama’s films are presented with newly commissioned creative captions for the d/Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing, designed by Carefuffle, a disabled and queer-led working group.

10-minute break

Masterclass with Marion Scemama
Marion Scemama joins Field Recordings co-director Tim Leyendekker for a conversation about her work, which sits at the intersection of experimental cinema, photography and audiovisual anthropology. Together they turn to the origins of her practice and her long collaboration with artist David Wojnarowicz, which deeply shaped her work and is felt throughout this programme, as well as the practical reality of making radical cinema with limited means, from 1980s New York to the present.