MATERNAL FILIGREE1980

My own films usually begin with a question, and frequently lead into unexpected territory. MATERNAL FILIGREE began as an exploration of life in the female body, and led me astray. The film finally led me back to the original question. I thought MATTER OF CLARITY would be a nice, sensual journey through that attraction-of-opposites energy. However, it quickly ran out of control, and I had to struggle to rein it in. In AN ARCHITECTURE OF DESIRE, the manifestations of desire, and the opportunities for a clarity of observation, presented themselves during the filming in unforeseen ways. Like all rhythmic structures, the film is meant to be understood through the body and senses, as well as through the conceptual mind. “Davis’s earlier explorations of the body and sensuality come to fruition in this, her latest film. Through rigorous cross-cutting and use of extreme close-ups, manmade and natural manifestations of architecture merge with the physical body into palpable delineations of form and function.” — San Francisco Cinematheque program notes

MATERNAL FILIGREE is obviously vision rising thru inwards… it trembles like poetry, music – its rhythms OF and-at-one-with the experience itself. You have stiched a meaningful weave of symbolism throughout but always in the sense ‘make it new’ (as Pound translates the Chinese), so that symbol rubs and clashes with symbol, so that each is always vibrant, so that no symbol could harden midst the frets and stops of your ‘music’ – that symbols be felt beyond any set to of understanding… that none of them be ever anything like pomposity/(the known) but rather always sensual.” Stan Brakhage