WORK 2017-2025
dir. Kersti Jan Werdal, 2017-2025
80 min. In English.
United States.

FRIDAY, APRIL 18 - 7:30 PM followed by a discussion with Kersti Jan Werdal moderated by film curator Inney Prakash
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

This program of selected short films demonstrates the evolution over the past decade of Kersti Jan Werdal's mastery of film form, her eye for composition, her historical fascinations and the interdisciplinary nature of her overall approach to cinema. WORK 2017-2025 spans documentary, reenactment, essay and dance films, culminating in the juxtaposition of 2017's CEDAR ROSE (which forms a perfect complement with Werdal's haunting debut feature LAKE FOREST PARK due to its use of archival material and its Pacific Northwestern locale) and her latest film TEST PIECE.

"Spending hours and hours over large stretches of time with objects, ephemera, photographs, and artworks which encompass a person’s life, I began to consider the concept of an archive, and how the elusive slippery elements of memory can be imposed upon materials and live on once the person has passed. As the archive takes shape, what’s required is a person or institution making a choice of what is kept or discarded, reflecting and informing a history which can be accurate to that history or not. I feel this is similarly tied to field-work, and the role of the anthropologist, which is impossibly problematic. Things are left out, often one or just a handful of viewpoints are reflected, and what’s left is something which many present as objective, which is in truth, inherently subjective. I feel this is also why I tend to avoid the term documentary, I’m not sure it exists, or rather - if the term holds the same meaning that it used to. I’m always considering this when making and think it’s partially why archival materials wind up in my work." - Kersti Jan Werdal, interview with the Grand Cinema

SLOW SHAPES
2017. 12 min.

Shot in Manhattan, Brittany Bailey uses sidewalks and roadside monuments as a proxy for a stage, or dance studio. Her body creates improvised shapes utilizing the negative space between limbs, concrete, vehicles, and locals walking to where they are going.

PROMENADE
2018. 15 min.

PROMENADE is an observational doc portrait of dancer-choreographer Brittany Bailey as she prepares to debut a new work, while interrogating performance representation in moving image.

I CANNOT NOW RECALL
2023. 15 min.

In I CANNOT NOW RECALL, Kersti Jan Werdal guides the viewer through a selection of Yvonne Rainer’s dreams, chosen by the filmmaker from a collection of Rainer’s journals archived at The Getty Museum. Constellated first through Werdal’s selections, and then refracted through the readings of a street-cast filmed in LA High Memorial Park, Rainer’s dreams appear as nodes on an anxious psychic ecosystem. As the material distills from private reflection into script into performance, what emerges is a vital interchange between desire and disquiet. References to the medium of film seem to further entangle the relationship between filmmaker and subject, as well as the relationship between film and viewer. Joined by doubles and guides, in unfinished buildings and the depths of outer space, the dreamer explores her subconscious with a probing appetite for expansion and wholeness – but who the dreamer is exactly remains an open question.

CEDAR ROSE
2017. 8 min.

"In CEDAR ROSE, Werdal’s approach provides a productive space in which a forgotten language and archive is presented as it is, without being explained or argued. Werdal allows for this dark margin of the archive, as Trond Ludemo describes it, this gap, in her bold decision of only having archival footage of the seemingly mundane language course coupled with her observational shots of the land the tribe was erased from, bearing the weight of landscape and the consequences and effects of accelerated technology and capitalism. However, Werdal does not explain this approach, and so there is a respect to the culture as it is and was through the opacity Werdal allows it in her film." - Lucy Kerr

TEST PIECE
2025. 19 min.

Kersti Jan Werdal’s TEST PIECE dismantles cinematic conventions through a disjunctive, non-narrative layering of images, sounds, and text. From an archer in a natural landscape to a theatrical dark void where sounds are described rather than heard, and finally to a diverse collection of source texts narrated in a park, TEST PIECE constructs a dynamic and evolving cinematic space that invites viewers to critically engage with the film’s conceptual and intellectual potential.