Mary Stephen's Shorts

Labyrinthe
Dirs: Mary Stephen, A. MacLeod, P. Bridgeman
1973 / B/W / D Beta / No Dialogue / 5min

A Very Easy Death
Dir: Mary Stephen
Orig Story: Simone de Beauvoir
1975 / Colour / D Beta / No Dialogue / 8min

Vision from the Edge: Breyten Breytenbach Painting the Lines
Dir: Mary Stephen
Scrs: Mary Stephen, Breyten Breytenbach
Cast: Breyten Breytenbach
1998 / Colour / D Beta / English / Eng subtitles / 58min

Like Rohmer, Mary Stephen immerses herself in the creative potentials and practical realities of working with 16mm film when she took the directorial reins, as evidenced by the three shorts presented in this programme.

Shot during her time in Canada, Labyrinthe is an experimental spellbinder. Two girls, one Caucasian and the other Asian, are dressed in identical attires, loitering in, bumping along and leaping up and down labyrinth-like cross-cutting corridors where religious and social contexts overlap. Traversing between art and intellectual spheres of East and West, Stephen and her co-directors put their finger on the pulse of the paradoxes that underlie a dual cultural identity.

A Very Easy Death is a profoundly moving end-of-life account of Stephen's mother passing away in a hospital. Taking inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir's masterpiece, Stephen's finely nuanced portrait of bereavement, takes the viewers metaphorically through songs and images.

In Vision from the Edge: Breyten Breytenbach Painting the Lines, Stephen's camera follows the exiled South African poet–artist Breyten Breytenbach as he executes a series of scroll paintings for a museum in the Netherlands. Poetry readings in different tongues are fused with the poet's reflection on philosophies of religion and mind.