Breaths, Falls, and Eddies in All This Can Happen: A Dialogue

Abstract

Dancefilm muddles the paradigms that would position film as an order of production controlling all cinematic motion (including camera movement, film speed, editing etc.), and dance as motion, liberated and encompassing any-movement-whatever. David Hinton and Siobhan Davies’ experimental film, All This Can Happen (2013), draws text, image, and edit together via a poetics that is of the order of the choreographic. In a dialogue that echoes the collaborative spirit of the film, Erin Brannigan and Cleo Mees explore the corporeal and choreographic sensibilites at work in All This Can Happen, recognizing dynamics of breath and weight in various aspects of the film’s composition, including the movements of the bodies on screen, the qualities of the edit, and the text of Robert Walser’s original novella (on which the film is based). In exploring these corporeal-cinematic qualities, the authors work across and soften the dance-film binary described above.