Marjorie Keller (1950–1994)
Ancient Parts/Foreign Parts (1979)
The first two in a series of in-camera edited films. ANCIENT PARTS portrays the symbolic differentiation and mock conquest of a boy and his mother. ... I watched the boy play Narcissus and Oedipus in three minutes. The small camera, the fact that we had all lived together for so long (during the shooting of MISCONCEPTION), the rich golden grain of the film all provide the privilege of intimacy. FOREIGN PARTS portrays the poetics of family life in an unfamiliar context. FOREIGN PARTS is a single camera roll. Many people go home to foreign parts: a few familiar faces in a strange landscape. In such circumstances the ordinary is the most precious, given a slight shift of being in its new context. All we can glean from the experiences are a few new memories built on old images. Using a camera at such times is refined work; raw intuition works better than careful planning.