Film Elegy

Laura Paul's Film Elegy is a document of personal loss and the decline of celluloid. Modified from 16mm and formatted to fit the page, Paul’s book asks to be viewed as much as read. Punctuation evokes flickering light, sprocket holes, and cutaway shots, layering photochemical processes as rhapsodic undertones. “I burn bright | for you,” Paul writes, “for our love of images and silver | so combustible.” Framed by Paul’s friendship and apprenticeship with the late filmmaker Amy Halpern (1953–2022), the book speaks to the communities and legacies of screen culture. It honors the encounters between spectators and films as well as the attachments formed between them—what Godard calls “the relation with me looking at it dreaming up a relation.” As our dreams of the screen flicker, Film Elegy projects words in silver gelatin.