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All images and texts are copyright protected, ©2024 Evelyn Lee
WINNIE SU 19 E BAYONNE
35mm Film Photography, USA, 2023
concept and photography Evelyn Lee
Winnie Su 19 E Bayonne is a tribute to a film named Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman in 1975. The film topped the BFI’s top 100 films which successfully caught my curiosity. It’s a three-and-a-half-hour-long film but can be summed up in a single sentence: the daily life of a middle-aged widow in three days. The camera position and movement were almost the same and ninety percent of the scenes were shot in the director’s apartment. Despite this repetition, the film delves much deeper than we see.
Spending three days with my friend Winnie Su, a photographer based in New York, the behavior of “staring” was like a ritual in her day-to-day life. We watched her life unfold, through photos of her cooking, eating, walking, living…etc. Even though not everyone knew her personally, since then, she has become someone who is both familiar and unfamiliar to our impressions, and we felt both close yet distant from her. This is the charm of cinema – they lure you, hold you, and allow you to experience without having firsthand knowledge of it but at the same time, it’s surreal.
Concluding this project with my favorite review of Vagabond (Agnès Varda, France, 1985):
“Cinema is a powerful form of hypnotism where the protagonists come alive within you for a while. You express freely; you behave without inhibitions. The only thing you can do is keep watching to continue the hypnotic experience and live vicariously through someone else’s life.”