Jane Dossier: interweaving life, sound and film will be available at the Royal College of Art Degree Show, 2019.
—
Looking in detail at the life and work of the writer Jane Wodening, Jane Dossier uses biography, criticism and fiction as a methodology for looking past and in-between fragments of film as it relates to text. This study presents points of comparison between the constructive logic of Jane Wodening’s writing and cinematic techniques employed by Stan Brakhage in films made in the years 1957-2003. Jane Dossier uses the form of the dossier to open up, embody and perform aspects of life, sound and the role of film as it works within Wodening’s experiments with text.
Wodening’s scrapbooks are the beating heart of this study, while interview transcripts taken from in-person meetings with Wodening inform the overall structure and position of the writer. Jane Dossier suggests itself as the textual equivalent of Brakhage’s filmic experiments insofar as they are both to be seen as uncut, ongoing, collaged and fragmentary. Jane Dossier pays homage to the idea of layering, superimposing on and physically distressing film, a technique championed by Brakhage and his milieu.
olivia fletcher 