Daria Martin

Tonight the World draws from a cross-section of dream diaries kept by Martin’s grandmother, Susi Stiassni, who fled the imminent Nazi occupation of Czechoslavakia in 1938. Through five chapters, the film links as many dreams sited in Susi’s childhood home, Villa Stiassni, a modernist mansion built by Susi’s parents, who were prominent Jewish textile manufacturers in the industrial hub of Brno. Conjured in Susi’s imagination from her middle-age onwards, in the context of psychoanalysis, the dream diaries as a whole span 40 years and 40,000 dreams, but Martin’s selection focuses tightly on dreams about intruders within the Villa, recreating a narrative of threat and escape that parallels Susi’s lived experience. Retracing the legacy of her grandmother’s emotional history, Martin considers the unconscious underpinnings of intergenerational trauma, loss and resilience.

Tonight the World draws from a cross-section of dream diaries kept by Martin’s grandmother, Susi Stiassni, who fled the imminent Nazi occupation of Czechoslavakia in 1938. Through five chapters, the film links as many dreams sited in Susi’s childhood home, Villa Stiassni, a modernist mansion built by Susi’s parents, who were prominent Jewish textile manufacturers in the industrial hub of Brno. Conjured in Susi’s imagination from her middle-age onwards, in the context of psychoanalysis, the dream diaries as a whole span 40 years and 40,000 dreams, but Martin’s selection focuses tightly on dreams about intruders within the Villa, recreating a narrative of threat and escape that parallels Susi’s lived experience. Retracing the legacy of her grandmother’s emotional history, Martin considers the unconscious underpinnings of intergenerational trauma, loss and resilience.

“What fascinates me [about film],” says Daria Martin, “is the essential contradiction of the medium: its layered ephemeral and sensual aspect, its articulation of psychological projection together with a necessary physical realization of fantasy. The camera, circling around or brushing close to constructed sets, props, faces, and bodies, caresses these material elements, intimately describes their sculptural surfaces, and yet, paradoxically, when these images are projected as a beam of light, they become transparent, their heft subtracted. I want to play at seducing the viewer while allowing escape routes from the game. My implementation of certain ideals – primary colors, mechanical or athletic bodies, geometric sets, smooth skinned faces – is always tempered by the presence of something a little more awkward: shadows, seams, aging, exhaustion.”

“What fascinates me [about film],” says Daria Martin, “is the essential contradiction of the medium: its layered ephemeral and sensual aspect, its articulation of psychological projection together with a necessary physical realization of fantasy. The camera, circling around or brushing close to constructed sets, props, faces, and bodies, caresses these material elements, intimately describes their sculptural surfaces, and yet, paradoxically, when these images are projected as a beam of light, they become transparent, their heft subtracted. I want to play at seducing the viewer while allowing escape routes from the game. My implementation of certain ideals – primary colors, mechanical or athletic bodies, geometric sets, smooth skinned faces – is always tempered by the presence of something a little more awkward: shadows, seams, aging, exhaustion.”

Closeup Gallery completes the trilogy of short films that began with In the Palace (2000) and Birds (2001). The small communities of those earlier films are replaced here by an intimate communion of two; the earlier elaborate mise en scene are distilled into the microcosm of a card-covered table; the conceit of ‘hand made magic’ that travels through the trilogy is here literalized through the card players’ world of fakery, where simple materials transform.

The film follows five dancers on an all-white, moving set. At first they wear highly stylised, predominantly white costumes before switching to all-white leotards and coloured cellophane headdresses with matching extensions on each of their fingers. The dancers form complex compositions comparable to abstract paintings and hold their poses in tableaux. At other points they explore parts of the moving scenography.

In the Palace is the first film in a trilogy followed by Birds (2001) and Closeup Gallery (2003). It constituted Daria Martin’s MFA thesis at University of California, Los Angeles and was shot with a 16mm camera and released in an edition of four. Tate’s copy is the fourth in the edition. The film is set in a scaled up twenty-five foot (7620 mm) high version of the sculpture The Palace at 4 A.M. 1932 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) by Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti, from which it takes its title.