On March 26, 2026, e-flux Screening Room presented a screening and discussion with filmmaker and artist Mary Helena Clark. The program brought together a selection of Clark’s films with works by Stephen Sutcliffe and Margaret Raspé selected by Clark as points of affinity and dialogue. The screening was followed by a public conversation between Clark, Lukas Brasiskis, and the audience. The transcript of this conversation was edited for the present publication.
Question: Let’s start with the structure of the program. Why did you want to place your own work in dialogue with films by Stephen Sutcliffe and Margaret Raspé?
Mary Helena Clark: I really love Stephen Sutcliffe’s work, and I feel an affinity with the way he uses archives. Sometimes he lets things sit and be as they are, and other times he really manipulates them. That movement between something being relatively undigested and something being very worked over is interesting to me. I also love the tight arrangements he makes. Maybe you can tell that I do not have that impulse, because there are a lot of things floating around in my films. Maybe I’m attracted to something I can’t do myself.
Margaret Raspé writes about her process with the Super 8 helmet camera as a prosthesis, and my films deal with extensions of the body: the chair in The Glass Note, for instance, as a sensorial extension that lets you hear through its arm, or the night-vision camera as a way of extending human sight. Artificial appendages attached to a person are interesting to me. I was also interested in the way Raspé talks about the automated actions of domestic labor.
Question: Raspé’s only silent film in the program made me think about the importance of the relation between image and voice in your works. Even more, I think we could speak about the relationship between image and language in your films: language both as written text and spoken word. It is common to refer to psychoanalysis in these kinds of discussions, but I also kept thinking about phenomenology—how and what we perceive and feel while watching your films. Let’s say Neighboring Animals. The film moves from the mouth as a biological site to the mouth as a speech-producing mechanism. What drew you to think about that and choose a particular form to express that?
MHC: Yes, language in Neighboring Animals is included, in part, as one of the attributes used to separate humans from animals. Language, reason, and thumbs are often cited in this way. But the film started in two directions. One was a story my mom told about when she was a little girl and bit a decorative egg that she wanted to have, out of jealousy. The other was an interest in primate dentistry and the morphology of the mouth.
At first, I wanted to make a film just about my mom biting this egg. There was something so primal about the incorporation of an object into her body, something infantile and erotic, and also, because I’m from the South and she is this mannered Southern woman, it felt like an eruption of desire. Originally, the whole film was going to be about that.
In my mind, this image of a parabola connecting desire and disgust appeared as a way of structuring the film. I started thinking about the mouth as a site that holds both of those things. Then I started thinking about primate dentistry and how close we can get to a mouth before we no longer know what species we are looking at.
Because this was a story my mom often told, I was also thinking about voice, voice production, the tongue, and basically the co-opting of a system for biting and eating into a system for language. But all of that really came out of wanting to look at teeth. I didn’t realize until tonight that there are teeth in Figure Minus Fact too, shark teeth. So the teeth were always there!
With Clever Hans, the connection to language is more explicit. It is a riff on an early attempt at animal communication. I had read about the experiment in which a horse named Hans would tap out answers to questions. He was celebrated in Scientific American and then later debunked as an example of unconscious cueing. I am interested in the failure, and projection, that happens inside the experiment, and, again, in desire interrupting or informing knowledge production, or the attempt to understand. I was also thinking about how absurd it is, and what hubris it takes, to ignore all the ways an animal might understand the world and instead ask it to understand something as simple as arithmetic.
Question: You mentioned that Clever Hans was first installed as a two-channel work. Tonight we saw the single-channel version of it. Despite these differences in presentation of the work, I am curious: What exactly are those images we see in the film?
MHC: You don’t see a lot. Watching the program tonight, I realized so many things that generate a whole set of images, or a whole collage of sound, image, and text, are not really dominant in the final film, or are only there in the slightest way. The stabbed painting of The Rokeby Venus, for instance, is only in Exhibition for a moment, and that image instigated the whole film. I thought, why do I do that? There is some frustration around really serving something up. The films are always circling around their origins.
With Clever Hans, it could have been a real horse and a real man, but because the work was playing with character through dialogue and a dream story, I thought it would be more interesting to look at the most depersonalized presentation of a human. X-rays were also invented around that time, and the Clever Hans experiment is tied to this desire to look inside another. I think that is why I use medical imagery in other work, too.
The horse’s hoof is an animation, floating in space, and we see it from below, so we are almost being stamped on. The human image, a real X-ray of a talking skull, returns to the mouth, which is a thread that runs through a lot of the work.
Question: What I find interesting about cueing in Clever Hans is that it produces a kind of communication, but not a linguistic one. The theory was debunked scientifically, but at the same time it reveals another possibility for communication beyond language. In some way, I feel that your films often seem to work through a similarly nonlinguistic connection between the viewer and the sound-image. While working on your films, do you think about the affects you want the viewer to perceive? And also: when you edit, how do you know that two shots, or a sound and an image, have come together?
MHC: I guess they could be thought of as collages of stimulation, but I usually think of them as collages of senses. There is a choreography happening that proposes a way of being in the world, or of some sort of imaginary, unseen body constituted by the film.
For a long time, I used text without speech. I would often choose texts that felt voicey. In The Glass Note, for instance, there is this creepy explanation about rubbing statues from a Roadside America blog. I was aghast at the way they were talking about rubbing the Little Mermaid statue, or whatever statue it was. I’ve been interested in the way images and sounds can carry traces of their former sources, and how fragments of language can do the same.
The text might cue you up, or prepare you to read an image in a different light. But there are usually a handful of moments in a film where one sound-image pairing contains everything that I feel the film is about.
In Neighboring Animals, for example, there is a choral presentation in a whispering church while you are looking at animal bite mark analysis on scraps of paper. In that combination, the chewed-up paper becomes sacrament, or something like that. It’s transformed.
With Figure Minus Fact, an important combination for me is when you hear the sound of the swing set, which sets up a swinging horizon line, and then you see these bells ringing. There is a frustration of the expected sound that would come from the ringing—we don’t hear the bells, but the swing set sound still latches onto the image through movement. We know it is not “right,” but that play of reconciliation of source is really interesting to me. It is usually about rhyme, rhythm, and an off-kilter causality.
Question: You mentioned science earlier, partly tongue-in-cheek, but your films also often turn to archives and scientific forms of attending to the world. In The Glass Note, for instance, the scanning image suggests the production of knowledge, even as that knowledge remains withheld. What is your attitude toward scientific evidence, and do you have your own philosophy of science?
MHC: No philosophy. But the failure of evidence, or studying the trace in order to make sense of the world, is how I have often described Figure Minus Fact. Those shots were made in our family home after my father’s death, so it was very much about a world being remade, and about being analytical at a time when nothing really made sense.
The idea of going to the bell tower is an attempt to pin a sound down to its source, to understand it. But it doesn’t really do anything. In the film, I don’t even give you the corresponding sound of the ringing bells. So maybe it is also about the futility of those efforts.
Question: In the description of The Glass Note, you use the idea of ventriloquism. I understand that as a disconnection of sound from its source. Could you say more about the importance of ventriloquism for your work?
MHC: Yes, for sure. The Glass Note is very much about commingled senses. The images are mostly some kind of illusory, sleight of hand that plays with perception. The scanner line of light is touching the shell, and also flattening it. Then, with the image that follows it, of my friend singing, the film denies any full engrossment. She becomes this flat image moving up the screen.
That film was my first attempt to really show the edges of everything. There are several images set into the screen, opening up into new spaces, sliding over one another, which gives the film, in my mind, a foreground and a background. Sound could then operate as an animating force behind the image, which is why I talk about that film through the metaphor of ventriloquism.
Seeing it next to Figure Minus Fact, where there are all these references to camouflage, makes me think of ventriloquism as a form of camouflage, a defensive illusion. In Exhibition, too, there is the idea that visibility is dangerous. These are different approaches, but they are all forms of evasion.
Question: Could you say more about the title Exhibition? Are you playing with its art-world sense, as the apparatus through which art is presented?
MHC: I remember that I wanted to make a movie about art vandalism, so I was reading about it. I loved the way Mary Richardson seemed to say that the world did not deserve female beauty, and then she slashed the painting. I took that and ran with it.
Question: I feel that humor plays an important role in your films too. Do you work with humor intentionally?
MHC: I do, but ... I didn’t get any laughs tonight. There is an asshole joke. Crickets are subtitled as silence, and that usually gets one chuckle.
I think humor is important. It is another kind of deflation. Looking at all the things I put in a movie about my dead dad, humor is a good thing to add to the mix. Self-seriousness is a problem.
Question: What differs when you make works for a cinema screening and when you make them for an installation in a gallery?
MHC: I don’t think some of the goofy, humorous, trompe-l’œil stuff in The Glass Note would really work in a gallery. The film needs the surrounding blackness of a theater in order for the play with depth to work. That film needs the screen. I think Exhibition needs a cinema too, because the initial concept was the film as exhibition, the film as the container for all these desired, unruly objects. The video I’m making now, I was thinking about showing it tonight, but then I thought, no, this has to be behind glass. It belongs on a monitor. It is also more modular by design because it will be shown in a gallery.
When moving between these spaces, I like to think about that kind of choreography or montage in a gallery, where sound can be spatialized. I’ve made a few sculptures that have sound emanating from them, and for me that has a direct correlation to the sound-image pairing that I have been doing for a while in films.
Question: I’m interested in the way you force a contradiction between text, image, and audio. What do you think about translation, or, even more importantly, mistranslation?
MHC: I love mistranslation. I don’t know if I would do this now, but I think the way I have used audio description in past films plays a little bit with the idea of translation.
But I also feel like most of these films are attempts to translate an experience. That is what they are all up to. They are all grappling with the question of how we make meaning in the world, and that also brings up questions of language.
Question: Before you start putting things together in Premiere, are you writing or maybe drawing? Is there a structure before you begin editing, or is it found in the process?
MHC: The only film that started with writing was Exhibition. All of the others started with one image. For The Glass Note, the first image was the lasers on the throat. It came back from the lab, and it was not until I added the humming that I realized what the film was about. A friend described it as the “in/on” problem: are the lasers in the throat, or are they on the skin? That combination opened up all the images that followed.
So yes, Exhibition is the only one that was written before I produced any images, and it was designed to be the most visually spare.
Question: One of the things I enjoy in your films is the intentionality behind the images you bring in. Is there an image you would like to create that you have not yet had access to?
MHC: I don’t know what the image would be. I feel like these films are actually moving away from visual pleasure. They are slowing down. They are getting into Xerox scraps and 480p ultrasounds. Because you can make any image now, maybe working with highly circulated images is the most interesting to me. I listened to this Mark Leckey interview, and I loved the way he talked about a degraded image as having eaves, as a way for you to crawl into the image. I like messy images in which you can find something else.
The greatest pleasure is when something that already exists has somehow already answered a question you had. Those bite mark analysis images are from some PDF by someone at a state park. It is like she already did it. I don’t have to do anything. I like that.
Question: I’m also curious about the medium itself. You have worked with analog 16mm film, video, and digital film. How important is the medium to you, and what role does analog film play in your work today?
MHC: When I went to film school, that is how you learned to make films. It was my first language with image-making. I love all the tools and the speed and the lag in processing. I think all of that is great. I also love the attention to the surface of the image that analog film brings.
But I have trouble sticking to one format. I like for the film to feel as if it is switching skins a lot. Then you wonder why that image needed to be made with a night-vision camera, or MiniDV, or some other format. Usually it comes from the subject. Choosing the format becomes a way of accessing and digesting the content of the images.
