Teddy Bears and Blood

In Diane Severin Nguyen's In Her Time (Iris's Version), we see our titular character preparing for a role in a movie. We receive Iris's point of view filmed in standard-definition, with voice-over in Mandarin and English, formally somewhere between documentary and video diary. She lives in a high-rise overlooking a theme park, and our time with her is split between there, around the city, and on set.

The majority of our soundtrack is MIDI-like guitar, riffs reminiscent of 90's alt-rock with a tonal quality of a Geocities fanpage, painting a coming-of-age effect on Iris' transition into her big role. In one of Iris' voiceovers, she refers to scenes with no dialog, with emotion conveyed via soundtrack; she could be speaking about the film we're watching or the film she will act in. This Assayas-like metanarrative is a theme here and in Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich's Too Bright To See (Part I), materialized in the film-about-a-film format. Both highlight scenes of protagonists running lines agitating between reading and detachment, acting and drama. The fourth wall is broken through direct speech and through intentionally hammy line readings. Both films consider the role of moving images in reproducing history, and have an eye toward the material of those images: the pinky visceral red of Nguyen's viewing room, the starchy yellow sky in Hunt-Ehrlich's.

Early on in In Her Time (Iris's Version), the protagonist peels a tangerine and takes a bite out of it whole, pithy and unsegmented. Here and in close-up shots of teddy bear fur, mylar, confetti, asphalt, and blood, we can see an aesthetic through-line to the artist's studio photography, with references to the shimmery and the gross. Violence is foreshadowed through scenes with scissors and blood. These scenes are contextualized when we see Iris reading a book titled the Rape of Nanking: she is doing research for her role, which takes place during what our museum text calls the Massacre of Nanjing. This difference in terms points to one of the principles of the film: shifting relationships to events through the distance of time, language, and nation.

Both films hold an interest in what can be uncovered through reproduction, performance and reenactment. In Too Bright To See, the subject is a person and their work. And although a historical trauma would seem to be what's uncovered in In Her Time (Iris's Version), the potential for that uncovering is up for debate, and we are given a film that is at its core a character study: a bildungsroman about a young woman trying to figure out the role of the contemporary individual in constructing historical memory.

Iris has been acting for a year, mostly as an extra. In 'our' film she is not just the main character but our only character; Her lines are the only ones we hear. There's a link here between the extra in film, and the 'extra' of the villager or soldier, both relegated from subjectivity to background, individual to landscape, in the greater historical memory rendered bloodily opaque by war and nation building. Dummies are stabbed by bayonet, and soldiers surround Iris and child in character, when confetti falls in lieu of live rounds. The gruesome horror that makes up a defining social trauma is not re-enactable, so new images are made. Celebration and terror are put in proximity.

At the end of the film after all her hard work, Iris—in a moment too matter-of-fact to be confessional—tells us that she doesn't have any hope of the viewer 'getting it'; we can only 'get' ourselves. What's the role of the actor, then, if not to translate between the other and the self? In our final scene, Iris tells us that her greatest fear is not being paid attention to, being forgotten. She is at a wrap party, up on stage, the extras only just so far away.