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Excerpt from the booklet of Plunge.
Vivian Ostrovsky, or Sei Shônagon with a Movie Camera, by Federico Rossin

Whenever humanity seems condemned by gravity, I think to myself that I should fly, like Perseus, into a completely different spatial dimension. I'm not talking about an escape into the world of dreams or irrationality. I'm talking about completely revising my approach to the world, looking at it through a different lens, applying a different type of logic and new methods of knowledge gathering and substantiation. I'm searching for a vision of weightlessness that won't be dissipated, like a dream, by the realities of present and future…
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Sei Shônagon (born in or around 965) was a member of the court of Emperor Ichijô; she became the personal companion of Empress Fujiwara no Teishi (Sadako). Sei Shônagon's Makura no sôshi [The Pillow Book] is a compilation of the lists, anecdotes, reflections, poetic compositions, complaints and observations that she gathered during her time at the emperor's court. Allowing her imagination to run freely, she created a cumulative portrait of Japan under the Fujiwara regime, using a combination of tableaux, portraits, anecdotes, short stories, tangential digressions and esthetic commentary. This genre of accumulative text is known as zuihitsu (literally translated as "follow the brush") in Japan.

Vivian Ostrovsky is not a Japanese courtesan of the 10^th century but an experimental filmmaker, born in New York, raised in Rio de Janeiro and educated in Paris. Her films can be described as extimate diaries (journaux extimes, a phrase coined by Michel Tournier) which, rather than looking inwards, probe the inner life of the author's external surroundings. If the personal diary (journal intime) can be seen as "a miserable withdrawal into 'our accumulation of wretched secrets'" — a decidedly confessional literary space — the journal extime can be described as a "centrifugal movement of discovery and conquest," which provokes a sort of "outdoor composition," inspiring the author to abandon herself to the world around her, before transcribing her experiences into her diary. Ostrovsky's work subverts the first-person point of view in order to project beyond the individual and provoke a decentering of the self, resulting in a series of (often short) films, whose claims to the truth are to be seen as conditional, created with irony and a sense of humor.

There are strange similarities to be found between the literary work of Sei Shônagon and the cinematic work of Vivian Ostrovsky. Both artists reject a programmatic, ideological or doctrinal point of view and freely combine material from a wide range of different sources (poetry and novels / archival film and quotations) with their own personal experiences. One struggles to define these texts and films which, while focusing on the complexity and indeterminacy of life, cannot be reduced to these themes alone. The reflective visions of Sei Shônagon and Vivian Ostrovsky are at once anthropological, existential and ironic; their work is focused upon the human journey in all of its turmoil, confusion, beauty and comedy.

Ostrovsky's films develop out of the present tense. Her documentation of faces, motifs and moments is the result of a profound affection for the most ordinary moments of daily life. It's impossible to apply this kind of persistent observation, implemented with a Super 8mm camera, without subverting the classic rules of filmmaking. From one film to the next, Vivian Ostrovsky develops a hybrid cinematic format, something akin to the essay film, freed from the strictures of classic documentary filmmaking. The endless fluctuations of life necessitate a flexible approach to text and an openness to contradiction and repetition in a cinematic context; lived experience, in all its variety, demands that linear progression give way to an exploration of different compositional techniques: fluctuation, digression, evocation, ellipsis. Sei Shônagon's zuihitsu demonstrates a similar approach to composition, using comparable techniques of ellipsis and ricochet.

The "things" that Vivian Ostrovsky "sees" are not bound by formula or limited by cinematic text; her cinematic zuihitsus are multifaceted and full of surprises. Her films bounce around in time, turn the lens on themselves for a fleeting moment, proceed from humorous anecdote to personal memory, take a detour into family history or artist's anecdote, completely free of the limitations of conventional beginnings or endings. "It's plain to see," wrote Montaigne, "that I have set out along a road which I shall follow, with neither toil nor interruption, as long as there's ink and paper in the world." (III, 9; p.945) Ostrovsky's film Allers-Venues [Comings and Goings] (1984) comes to an end, because holidays always have to end, but the film's libertarian idleness and foraging charms are endless.

From the booklet of Milestones.
Ginette Gervais & Gérard Lionet (Cannes, May 1975)

When you made the film, did you have very specific things to say, or did you let your friends say what they want?

We had a script, all the scenes were written. We would show a scene to a person who was going to play it: "What do you think? – Me? No! I wouldn't say that! – So what do you believe? What would you want to say?" From there, we struggled. I admit that sometimes I would have liked it to be different. For the scene between the doctor father and his draft dodger son, for example, we would have preferred a scene with lots of warmth between the two characters. But the actors had their own issues: the one playing the young man didn't like his father; the one playing the father didn't have a son, but had problems with his daughters. There was nothing we could do about this reality! People often say about editing that each element of a film has a life of its own, which is beyond our control. There is nothing unusual about the draft dodger being like that with his father: that's who he is, that's how cold and distant he is. All of this shapes the context of the film and sets the pace and atmosphere.

Is Milestones the film about the communes?

Yes, in a sense. During the 1960s, intergenerational tensions were very intense, there was a lot of conflict between young people and their parents. Because of this, we were cut off from our history, from the history of the United States. It was not part of our lives. We wanted to change the world, to overthrow class divisions, etc. Now we want to explore this history and learn from it, so we're studying American history, the history of the left in America. I don't think it's the same in France. We severed ties with all political parties. I knew nothing about the Communist Party, or the struggles in the 1930s during the Great Depression, etc. In the 1960s, we thought we were the center of the world, we believed we were the first to see these problems and fight them.

Where does this lack of curiosity about the Communist Party come from?

The Communist Party was very important in its day, but now it's just a wing of the Democratic Party with a revisionist and dogmatic stance. When I was at the heart of politics in the 1960s, I never heard a single good thing about the Communist Party. We didn't understand that every era calls for a different form of resistance; there were some really determined activists in the Communist Party, it's a complicated story with good and bad aspects. We don't know this history very well, but it's important to understand that a revolutionary struggle is the struggle of an entire people over many years. We need to understand history, because history is like blood. We want to show that people need to reconnect with their fathers; we're all in the same boat. It's very difficult because many people in the film haven't reached that point, like the draft dodger son and his doctor father.

When did your experience in communes start?

More than five years ago. We don't always stay in the same commune, but we always live with other people, with children, even if we move to another part of the United States, because this type of commune is everywhere. We started out as a collective of activists who work together all the time. Today I live with nine people and four children. We carry out political actions together and we live together because it's practical and because it pushes our responses and ideas in the direction we want. It's very difficult to live alone, it's expensive and it's not a good thing. I have a child and a girlfriend, but I don't want to have a family. This is essential in the film: the family is an ideology at the core of capitalism. We and many of our friends are very afraid of ending up in a family, with a dad, a mom, and children. It's difficult because in practice it's not always very clear and this raises questions in our work. Many people hover between living as a couple and as a small family, but we need to find other models.

The release of the Blu-ray When It Was Blue: Selected Works 1992-2022 offers the perfect opportunity to (re)discover the work of Jennifer Reeves. Trained at Bard College in the 1990s under Peggy Ahwesh, this filmmaker born in Akron, Ohio, has developed over three decades a practice of painted film that dialogues with the legacy of American avant-garde cinema. This anthology brings together 10 works digitized and restored by the artist herself in 2025, supported over the years by prestigious institutions such as the MacDowell Colony, the Wexner Center, and the Bard College Film Department. As Laura Staab notes in her essay accompanying the edition, Reeves "reanimated the remnants of the '60s avant-garde, sometimes lovingly. But her zombies unsettled old connotations even so, marring former beauty with vulgarity and noisy interference."

Critical Heir to Brakhage

Jennifer Reeves follows in the lineage of Stan Brakhage's visionary cinema while bringing a resolutely feminist dimension to it. Michael Sicinski notes that When It Was Blue is "a cosmological work on par with Dog Star Man," but with a fundamental difference: "Reeves engages with the cinema, and with the world, without the purported luxury of invisibility and objective distance accorded her male predecessors." This gendered position radically transforms the modernist legacy: where Brakhage projected a heroic gaze upon the world, Reeves films from a vulnerable body, aware of the threats that exterior space can represent.

Filming Violence and Its Traces

In her early films, Jennifer Reeves directly confronts the question of sexual violence suffered by women and its devastating effects. Girls Daydream About Hollywood (1992) juxtaposes scenes of female submission drawn from Hollywood cinema (Baby Doll, Blue Velvet) with audio recordings where male voices confess to rape and misogyny. The film shows how fantasies conveyed by cinema contaminate the reality of American teenage girls. Chronic (1996) continues this exploration by tracing "a jagged line from abuse to self-destruction and hospitalisation." These works don't merely denounce: they make the viewer viscerally feel the violence of these experiences. Laura Staab calls Girls a "shamefully underrated slab of punk anger," a film that "transfers that sense of violation onto the viewer. We are assaulted and degraded by the scenes, pushed toward us in an editing pattern that practically bruises our minds. The very form of the film turns its charged content into something unspeakably visceral."

Ecology as Existential Question

When It Was Blue (2008) marks a turning point in Reeves' work, expanding her perspective from the individual body to the body of the world. Shot over three years in Iceland, New Zealand, Central and North America, the film bears witness to a planet in transformation. Sicinski observes that the film shows "falling icecaps (more scenes of human despoliation of the landscape)," but refuses simplistic environmental didacticism. As he writes, Reeves creates "an acceptance, bracing in its honesty, that the world is both dangerous and beautiful."

Manual Gesture Against Digital Hegemony

In the digital age, Reeves persists in working 16mm film by hand. Her films are "hand-processed and hand-painted, the surface of the strip is cracked and speckled, tainted with bright colour, cut-up and pasted back together in different arrangements," Staab describes. This insistence on the materiality of the medium becomes an act of political and aesthetic resistance. The Hi-Con she frequently uses "emulated, for her, the way memory tampers with experience, leaving little more than an impression of the past." In Fear of Blushing (2001), the 7,200 hand-painted frames create a tactile intimacy that digital cannot reproduce.

A Legacy for Today's Cinema

Jennifer Reeves' work opens essential paths for contemporary experimental cinema: she demonstrates that it's possible to inherit modernist forms while critiquing them, to celebrate the beauty of the world while documenting its destruction, to work in abstraction while remaining political. This Blu-ray edition, accompanied by illuminating essays by Laura Staab and Michael Sicinski, allows us to measure the scope of an artistic journey that, for over thirty years, has continuously questioned our relationship to the visible and to lived experience.