In City as Self-Portrait, the mutual gaze is between the filmmaker and her fellow artist friend, with whom she shares quick glances across several spaces ( both privet and public) in Vienna, as person B narrates the filmmaker’s thoughts.
The script I wrote for: City as Self-Portrait
It’s the story of a soon-to-be graduate art student, grappling with her identity as an artist.
About six months ago, she reflected on Michel de Certeau’s notion of space as an anthropological, poetic, and mythic experience and how private spaces can become public. Naturally, she decided to create an experimental film about it. This is her attempt to make that film.
<Pause>
On the first day, she couldn’t decide how to start, so she toyed with the camera. Looking through the lens was like looking out of a window. The world composed itself in her frame, and from that frame, she could look into a private world.
Did she become a spy?
Well, almost. If gazing at people with a camera counts as spying.
Laura Mulvey said looking itself is a source of pleasure, as there is pleasure in being looked at. What was going to be the object of looked-at-ness in this film?
<Pause>
As she looked through her camera, she wondered if anybody out there would return her gaze. But that shouldn’t have happened. Right? Wasn’t the first lesson in film school to never look into the camera?
<Pause>
Most films and stories are set somewhere, anywhere but in a place. Exterior or interior, it’s all about place. But think about it: a kiss or a murder is an entirely different story depending on whether it takes place in a bathroom, bedroom, library, or elevator.
<Short Pause>
And the camera captures these places well.
The question was: what places played a significant role for her?
In responding to this, she began to draw her personal geography, retracing her path through all the neighborhoods and places she lived in Vienna.
The sum is seven—the number of times she changed her postal code address.
<Pause>
She realized she couldn’t go back in time, but she could return to scenes of love, happiness, petty crime, and fatal decisions.
Places hold accumulated times and memories that unfold like stories. She read.
These places became less about physical territory and more about inner mental space.
So after all, she might not map these paths, but experience them—to lose herself in this city, as one loses oneself in a forest, as Walter Benjamin says.
<Pause>
Once she finished filming, she wished she could use all the possibilities of starting and ending this film simultaneously—as if all could coexist without needing to edit or choose one shot over another.
https://aaa.dieangewandte.at/abschlussarbeiten/sama-adhami-city-as-self-portrait/
This short film was showcased at the Angewandte Festival in Vienna in July 2024.
