Point and Line to Plane

“Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. These two ways are not arbitrary, but are bound up with the phenomenon – developing out of its nature and characteristics: externally – or -inwardly.” This is how Point and line to plane opens, by quoting the enigmatic incipit of Wassily Kandinsky’s eponymous theoretical essay (1926). For Sofia Bohdanowicz, a young prolific filmmaker whose work has been widely noticed (cf. her MS Slavic 7 here, or her FIDLab project), it is all about the spaces where art as an inner experience and the ordeal of loss meet. Here, the loss of Giacomo Grisanzio, a friend with whom she shared a passion for the Russian painter. Through a detour via fiction, the director depicts her own journey, interpreted on screen by Deragh Campbell, an actress who played in her previous films and who was already her alter ego in MS Slavic 7. She never says a word on screen, yet her soft, melancholic voice makes comments in the form of a diary that guides us through a journey on the verge of depression. Step by step, in a world filmed in 16mm which seems hollowed-out, the film takes us from Canada to the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, by way of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. At the core of the film, the director also highlights the work of Hilma af Klint, a long-time unknown pioneer of abstraction – a spiritual and sensitive form of art for the director –, and the discreet threads connecting both painters. Thus, little by little, we follow the twists and turns of reminiscences, of given opportunities and of associations that the filmmaker suggests, here while listening to Mozart, there by using her Bolex. Then the film elaborates an ode to the vital powers of the images of ill-named abstract painting, and of cinema, both organic matters that Sofia Bohdanowicz collects in a dense and throbbing film. It is a matter of articulation and junction of the inside and the outside, and also an act of faith in cinema and art as remedies. And the film tries to make happen and welcome, like the plan in the title, a line coming out of so many scattered points, like those drawn by Kandinsky that are shown in the opening of the film. A line that draws a path towards the possibility to see, once again, as the finale suggests. (N.F.)