Counterlight by Maya Zack
The film “Counterlight” by Artist Maya Zack is the 3rd part of her award-winning Memory Trilogy following “Mother Economy” and “Black and White Rule”. “Counterlight” is a hypnotic journey into the depths of consciousness that follows the traces of poet Paul Celan, one of the greatest poets of the modern-postmodern era. A female archive researcher listens to extracts from original recordings by the poet and gradually changes from an archivist into an alchemist. She dissects in an almost surgical manner the archival materials – photographs, maps, documents and poems – that will enable her to reconstruct and resurrect the past and intervene in it till the boundaries between reality and documentation, past and present are blurred.
In a surrealistic process, she penetrates the space of an old street photograph of 1937 Czernowitz and meets Celan’s mother who is baking challah bread in her kitchen, until her task transforms into female magic which leads to the creation of the “memory-golem.” In recent years, Zack researched Paul Celan’s world and creative process, through the actual as well as mythical female figures in his life. To these, she has interwoven images of death and birth and dedicated the film to the memory of her mother.
