Ira Goryainova

A Film Jar

​​​

Starting with the premise that any documentary portrayal has something dominating and destructive in its nature, this performance – unfolding itself in the montage space of a filmmaker – tackles the relationship between the director and her protagonist, the construction and consequences of the gaze, as well as the vacuum of a film, which takes a real-life person hostage, engulfs, and seals them in forever.

In this cinematic lecture performance, I question the role and position of a filmmaker as inevitably hierarchic, dominating and maybe even destructive towards the protagonists. In doing so, I take my essay on a documentary film Réne by Helena Třeštíková as a case study, analyze it and reflect through it to my own practice as a filmmaker working with real life characters. Focusing on the notion of the gaze, the ways it is constructed, possible predeterminations for such a construction and its empathic perception in the viewer, I want to open up the filmmaker’s editing space and bare the processes in which decision are made – that in an expanded cinema form or, simply put: a lecture performance, in which an essay film unfolds in real time (on stage with a table, a computer and a video projection of the computer screen).
 

​​​​

Ira Goryainova is a filmmaker and researcher based in Brussels. The relationship between body, screen, and spectator is her main area of interest, which she explores in essay- and montage films, installations, and lecture-performances. Thematically her focus is on the body under extreme conditions – such as illness and death – and how they can be read as political metaphors while still conveying explicit bodily, non-narrative meanings. Goryainova’s work has been shown at IDFA, Hotdocs, Visions du Réel, Thessaloniki, Artdocfest, Argos, Halle für Kunst Steiermark, RIDM, Imagine Science Film Festival, Deutsches Theater Berlin, among others. She is a postdoctoral researcher, as well as a hybrid and documentary film teacher at RITCS, Brussels.