#subjective documents

Still from Everything that rises must converge, 2010 MARGARET SALMON’s films disclose their subjects by intimation; her characters emerge by degrees, by the slightest of gestures. A darting glance into the camera, wiping moisture from a hot brow, cradling the butt of a rifle: this is a slow cinema, marked less by ruptures and revolution than by Salmon’s proximal relation to intimate bodies.  Often working with a biographical constellation of subjects – family, friends, or local figures sourced from Salmon’s hometowns in suburban New York and Whitstable, England – intimacy is the sustained register of her films. Her work articulates «the emotive connection between humans,» which, says the artist, «can be transformed and described through film.» Salmon, born in New York in 1975, usually shoots her films alone, without artificial lighting, cinematographer, or sound engineer, and her work has frequently been described in relation to the documentary genre and cinéma vérité. But if the documentary is, as Cahiers du cinéma’s film critic Jean-Louis Comolli would have it, a creative attack on the ensemble of narratives unsuited to the cinematic, then Salmon’s form and its attendant narratives find themselves manifesting within the margins of the documentary and cinematic image. Her work searches for some through-road that attempts to reinvest the everyday with the lyrical nature of routine and, within those routines, she allows the camera to record rarer, incidental moments that emerge from breaks in habitual activity: the minor fissures where an alternative psychology manifests in opposition to one’s predetermined archetype, and where the masks of her performing subjects slip.