Jessica Curry (UK)
biography
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Video title:
I carry Your Heart
2008, 6:11
i carry your heart is a film about love: an unfashionable theme for these times perhaps. Set to a poem by e.e.cummings the film’s overriding concern is passion.
Cyril Connolly said that “there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” This film rails against that concept. It’s only since I had a child that I realise the fragility and exquisiteness of life, and the piece is a celebration of how motherhood has informed, changed, improved and fed my creativity. I literally carried my child’s heart inside me for nine months- perhaps the ultimate act of love and connection. My ongoing health problems, hinted at in the film, have only served to reinforce this feeling of wanting to hold on to life with a firm and stubborn grip. It also raises the question of whether love can exist without sacrifice.
I’ve never made an autobiographical piece of work before. I didn’t shoot any new material for the film, instead I used only existing images. The Super 8 footage is from my wedding, the child in the film and on the ultrasound is my son Oscar, the x-ray footage is mine and the final film is projected onto my body. The images has been digitally manipulated and re-coloured to imbue the film with a sense of hyper-realism, nostalgia, loss and hope. It was only latterly that I realised that this film is also about my father, who had a quadruple heart bypass last year. A surgeon held my dad’s heart in his hands and that imbues the heart footage with a particular poignance for me.
Mother, daughter, wife, lover. All these manifestations of womanhood are buried in the film. The line “here is the deepest secret nobody knows” also suggests the possibility of a private inner life for the artist. Three generations of men- my father, my husband and my son are portrayed in this film- and i carry is about wanting to be loved by all of them and wanting and needing to love them.
I find it difficult to put the film into any kind of theoretical context as, for me, this was a visceral act of creativity. I don’t think that any piece of music I’ve written has come so from the heart as this one.
This video participates in
CologneOFF IV – Here We Are!
4th edittion of Cologne Online Film Festival
Mother program