Siobhan Davies and David Hinton’s All This Can Happen (2012)

Abstract

This article considers All This Can Happen from an aesthetic point of view and connects this work, resulting from the tight collaboration of the dance film director David Hinton and the contemporary choreographer Siobhan Davies, to the history of avant-garde cinema. Apparently, All This Can Happen is not a dance film, although its rhythmic editing pays tribute to structural films of the seventies and deals with dance. It is not a run-of-the-mill “found footage” opus randomly organized, since the archives were discerningly selected. Subliminal shots, multi-screen images, photographic scratches, graphic signs, and pre-cinema elements associated with contrapunctal sounds produce fascinating effects, strange hallucinations, pure abstractions, and waking dream states, such as one could find in Georges Méliès films, as well as in Abel Gance’s, Maya Deren’s, or David Hinton’s. As a masterpiece worthy of the name, this film demands repeated viewing.