Zeno Writing 2002

Animated film using charcoal and pastel drawings, footage from theatre performance, and documentary material from World War I
35 mm film and digital video transferred to video; 12min.

Zeno Writing emerges as postscript to the theatre piece Confessions of Zeno, based on the novel by Italo Svevo. Like the novel and the theatre piece, the film renders obliquely our faintly desperate attempts to write an unstable world to order, to comprehend and control what is treacherous and nonsensical. The lines at the end of the film, 'Where are they all now? Smoke, Ashes, Fable? Perharps they are no longer even fable,' is from Herodotus, quoted by Ryszard Kapuscinski in The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat.