November 1–30, 2022
e-flux Video & Film is very pleased to feature two films by artist and filmmaker Rania Stephan: Threshold (2018, 11 minutes) and Memories for a Private Eye (2015, 31 minutes), streaming this November as this month’s edition of our ongoing series Staff Picks.
Entirely taken from an old Egyptian science fiction film called The Master of Time directed by Kamal el Sheikh in 1987, about an illuminated scientist wanting to extend human life, Threshold is built on the intuition that if the original film were emptied of all its fictional elements, retaining only the transition shots featuring doors, gates, and boundary crossings, it would reveal its quintessence: its obsession with eternity. Despite the plot being evacuated from the film, enough of the fiction seeps in for the viewer to grasp the narrative threads. The viewer joins the main character Mr. Kamel in becoming stuck in both space and time, thus fulfilling the scientist’s prophecy.
Memories for a Private Eye is the first chapter in a trilogy that investigates the filmmaker’s personal archive. Evoking the language of film noir, it foregrounds the fictional detective Marc McPhearson from the film Laura by Otto Preminger (1943), to help unfold deep and traumatic memories. The film spirals around a lost image: the only moving image of the filmmaker’s dead mother. How is absence lived? What remains of war, death, and love with the passing of time? These are the questions that are delicately displayed for contemplation. While dwelling on the past, the film weaves together images from different sources—private archive, cinema, television, YouTube—unfolding into a labyrinthine maze, and creating a blueprint of remembrance itself.
Watch the films here, streaming November 1–30, 2022.
About the artist
Rania Stephan (b. Beirut) is an artist and filmmaker working with still and moving images. She has directed art videos and creative documentaries. Her documentaries give a personal and poetic perspective to political events. Archival material has been an underlying enquiry in her artistic work. Her most recent work investigates forgotten images and sounds that haunt the present. By juxtaposing them with new ones, she explores a diversity of meanings, triggering renewed narratives and emotions. Approaching images like an editor—part detective, part cinephile—she traces absence and remembrance originary to those images. Described as a contemporary classic, her first feature film, The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011), was internationally acclaimed and won numerous prizes: Artist’s Prize: Sharjah Biennale 10; Renaud Victor Prize, FID Marseille International Cinema Festival; Best Filmmaker Award, Doha Tribeca Film Festival. Her second feature, In Fields of Words (2022), recently won Best Film Award at the Villa Medicis International Film Festival. She was recently appointed Associate Artist at the EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) in Paris France. Her artwork is represented by Marfa’ Gallery (Beirut).
About the series
e-flux Video & Film: Staff Picks is a monthly streaming series of staff picks and recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.