Double Take

Magic and cinema both revolve around illusion. Sleights of hand and deliberate techniques invite audiences to look again, squinting intently in a practice of truth-seeking. Double Take is composed of two experimental films by women exercising repetition as a cinematic conceit, emphasizing all that can be discovered (and undone) with an echo.

Deux fois (1968)
Dir. Jackie Raynal
63 min, digital. With Jackie Raynal, Francisco Viader

With Deux fois, the dexterous film editor Jackie Raynal made her directorial debut as part of the radical film collective Zanzibar Group. Filmed entirely during a nine-day trip to Barcelona, Deux fois orbits around Raynal herself: she breaks the frame, decorum, and rules of temporality in an experimental work that begins as a story and ends as a manifesto.

Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (By Kelly Gabron) (1992)
Dir. Cauleen Smith
2 min, digital

The interdisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith challenges the dominant terms of representation and authorship, interrogating the place of Black people across histories of media. In Chronicles of a Lying Spirit, Smith superimposes voice, image, and text into a play of photographic fragments and dueling narrators that dances at the margins of biography, myth, and mediatized fact.