Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another
Film screening and conversation
Monday, September 18 at 7pm
Harvard Film Archive
After the screening, Jessica Sarah Rinland (SMACT ’18) will be joined in a conversation with HFA Director Haden Guest and Narayan Khandekar, Director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Harvard Art Museums.
A meditation on the art and craft of conservation as a creative process, Jessica Sarah Rinland’s poetic documentary Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another follows the painstaking creation of a museum-quality replica of a historic elephant tusk. Observing closely the hands and tools of conservators, and the filmmaker herself, the film effectively defamiliarizes the ritualistic and technical work of conservators in a number of different museums and laboratories, including the Harvard Art Museums. This is the latest of a number of films Jessica Sarah Rinland has made exploring ecological and epistemological concepts and concerns.
The act of conserving is an attempt to halt a potential end, or to delay death. There is a human necessity to conserve. We clean, we fix, mothers keep their clothes wrapped in plastic bags, Aboriginal Australian communities repaint their rock art from generation to generation, grandmothers pass on stories to their grandchildren, we procreate. Repetition, mimicry, replication are all forms of conserving. — Jessica Sarah Rinland
