Suicide? No, Murder! (2017)

• 67%
• 2017
• Jamie Nares

This hybrid of diary and documentary was shot on Jamie Nares's first trip home since her arrival in New York three years prior. While the cultural upheaval of the 1970s has a presence (not least in its title), Suicide? No, Murder! shares the formal lyricism of the artist's experimental short films. Super-8 imagery of moments shared with family in and around Nares's English family home is replete with playfulness and a meditative quality that oscillates between tender and somber. The everyday is subject to formal and metaphysical questioning in a portrait of a young artist along a personal journey. Unfinished at the time, this screening premieres the artist's own digital restoration of this rarely seen and evocative work. Back in New York, the short Waiting for the Wind is an energetic study of the artist's body in motion in his sparse apartment. This accomplished production was described by critic Amy Taubin as a "technical tour-de-force.