Margaret Tedesco sits in a semi-dark room and watches entire feature-length films with the sound off and the projection blocked by her own body, then just tells you what she’s seeing, not the plot, not the names, just “she walks across the room, he touches the wall, they stand in blue light, it’s night.” Pronouns only, like she’s describing a dream she can barely remember. You don’t get to see the film, you only get her describing it in real-time, this weird oral translation that turns cinema into storytelling, passive watching into active imagining. It’s perverse, really, taking a visual medium and making it auditory, blocking the thing people came to see and replacing it with one woman’s account of gestures and mood and architecture. Could be maddening. Could be brilliant. Probably both. Depends on whether she’s got the voice for it, whether two hours of “she, he, they” becomes meditative or just makes you want to scream “WHO? WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” But there’s something genuine in the attempt, stripping away the apparatus of cinema to get at what remains when it’s just one person trying to describe what light and bodies do in space.
Margaret Tedesco’s performance at the Performance Studies international conference at Stanford University.