11/9/25

You Are Not I

Directed by Sara Driver (1981)

Followed by Q&A with director Sara Driver

A legendary, once-lost landmark of American underground cinema, Sara Driver’s thesis film was rediscovered a few years ago and has since taken its place as one of the key works of the No Wave filmmaking movement. Based on a story by Paul Bowles, You Are Not I takes the form of a fugue-state trance as it follows the journey of a disturbed woman (Suzanne Fletcher) who has escaped from an asylum and whose fractured mental state is reflected in the very form of the work. The film was considered forever lost after its negative was destroyed by a leak in a New Jersey warehouse, until a 16mm print was miraculously found in 2008, among Paul Bowles’ holdings in Tangier.

Courtesy of Films We Like

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Screens with:

Ghost of the Past (Bill Morrison, 2025, 7 mins, no dialogue)

A revision of SURVIVRE (1924, incomplete) directed by Edouard Chimot. “Baby Cry” Composed by Bill Frisell (Friz-Tone Music/BMI). Performed by Bill Frisell, Eyvind Kang & Rudy Royston

Director’s notes: In November 2021, I was invited to present my work at Histoires du Cinema Festival in Toulouse. During the festival, Francesca Bozzano, the director of collections at la Cinémathèque de Toulouse, invited me to visit their Research and Conservation Center in Balma. She wrote, “Would you like to have a look to some decomposed images we conserve? I found out some prints that you could find interesting.”

Among the relics she showed me were the surviving reels SURVIVRE (1924), directed by the artist Edouard Chimot. I made an edit that made use of the nitrate decomposition visible throughout the print. In my revision of the film, a passport officer (Sylvio de Pedrelli) dreams of an old flame (Justine Johnson), who then appears at his office with another man. Through the magic of nitrate celluloid disintegration, her current partner is temporarily dissolved, and the one-time couple are reunited again for a night of revelry.