‘By Your Response to Danger,’
2020
6:09
Digitized 16mm footage, digitized hand-processed super 8mm footage, digital video, sound.

‘By your response to danger,’ is a three-channel film essay composed of super 8mm, 16mm, digital footage, and audio recordings taken throughout a year of performances with Michael Zuhorski. This film explores the role that memory plays in creating evolving relationships between violence and victims, the shifts that occur in personal narratives over time, the ways that we process and re-process and live out and re-experience harms we experience and inflict. It plays out the tensions inherent to relationships: that two people may rely on each other as fully as possible and still be unable to completely understand one another, to receive communication the way it is intended.  It renders the disparity between intent and impact, and experiments with dependence and vulnerability. It visualizes the new circumstances created by deterioration and erasure.

Shot by Ellery Bryan and Michael Zuhorski. Film processed by Ellery Bryan and Colorlab. Audio recorded by Ellery Bryan. Editing and post-production by Ellery Bryan.

Special thanks to James Madison University, where Michael and Ellery were resident artists in March 2020, and partially completed this work.

Featured in a solo showcase of work by Ellery on quaran.tv on January 15, 2021.

Title in reference to Jenny Holzer’s 1989 piece, ‘BY YOUR RESPONSE TO DANGER, IT IS EASY TO TELL HOW YOU HAVE LIVED AND WHAT HAS BEEN DONE TO YOU. YOU SHOW WHETHER YOU WANT TO STAY ALIVE, WHETHER YOU THINK YOU DESERVE TO, AND WHETHER YOU BELIEVE IT IS ANY GOOD TO ACT.’