One Morning, in 1904
The Museum of Modern Art’s Modern Monday series presents An Evening with Jay Anania
New York, NY May 16, 2022
Review by Drake Stutesman
One Morning, In 1904
Director: Jay Anania
Music: Missy Mazzoli
2022
US
83 mins
Jay Anania's new film, One Morning, in 1904 is unique on many levels and beautiful on many levels. It has Borgesian devices but it isn’t Borgesian. It has a sensuality, a sense of ephemera, a structure of history, a pretense of biography, a reality of biography, a personal presence and a presence of unbelievable detachment. But none of these words really define what Anania has created in One Morning, in 1904. It is unique and, in a sense, Anania has conceived a new form. Ostensibly, the film is about Isabelle Eberhardt, who died in a flash flood in southern Algeria in 1904, after living, in men's clothes, in the deserts of these regions for many years. Her life has been revealed through journals and short stories. Some of the journals survived the flood, but Anania tells the viewer in voiceover, of which there are at least three different voices, in the first few minutes, the film will unfold her story by what was written on 24 pages that didn’t survive the flood and that this is what Isabelle Eberhardt would have written in her diary. This jars immediately and yet is comforting - allowing the viewer to feel the experience of the imagined pages, because it tells us that the imagination of what Isabelle Eberhardt is, alive or dead, writer, person, woman, man, is also imagined. The film is a companion of that reality - Who can know a historical person? Who can show what reading that person's words have influenced in a living reader? What is biography? What is the pleasure and joy of art? What is a real lived life and imagined life? The title is a floating place of what the film tries to effect, that is, One Morning, in 1904.
Must see. An extraordinary film that moves uniquely through time and space, with a focus on the life of French adventurer and writer Isabelle Eberhardt.
