Direct naar inhoud
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025

A Shape of Error

Abigail Child | Italy | 2012 | 70' | | IFFR 2012

Abigail Child uses home-movie aesthetics to reconstruct a life in a time when film still had to be invented. Based on diary notes by Mary Shelley (1797-1851) and her stepsister Claire, she filmed the problems of love, pregnancies, babies who died and the written work of these women, who were very emancipated for their day. Child focuses primarily on Mary’s intense love affair with Percy Shelley in the years when she was also writing her classic gothic novel, Frankenstein (1818).
The form of A Shape of Error is playful and adventurous, with split screen shots filled with doublings and mirrors, chronological facts in inter-titles and Mary’s poetic voiceover. For Child, the authenticity of the home video is a way to create intimacy. At the same time, her film is a self-reflective investigation of this authenticity, as she previously did in The Future Is Behind You. A Shape of Error is the first part of a trilogy about women and ideology, in which Shelley’s biography tackles Romanticism.

Film details

Italy, USA
Year
2012
Festival edition
IFFR 2012
Length
70"
Medium/Format
File

Dit zou je ook leuk kunnen vinden

  • Histoire de mes cheveux

    Artists and filmmakers can be unusual people. Of those unusual people, Boris Lehman is very unusual indeed. He has unusual obsessions, for instance wi

  • Iceberg

    Stunningly shot in the wintry Spanish countryside, the delicate Iceberg, made largely without dialogue, shows the world of young people who bear hidde

  • Le Havre

    An optimistic fairytale about a selfish old man who betters his life by helping a young African refugee. Heartwarming and drily comic scenes in the Fr