Dusty showers of light pour through neglected windows. Walls are stained in abstract patterns of soiled angles and tributaries of dirt.
Ceilings peel in brittle flakes.
They are rooms in the process of decay and disintegration, bits of their skin and shell pulled back in an architectural striptease, a detached electrical cord here, an exposed beam there. But then we realize we are not alone. We hear the sound of footsteps walking on creaky floorboards and the rustle of fabric. There is the snap and crank of a film cartridge and the click of a camera trigger. This is how Elisabeth Subrin begins The Fancy, her experimental video biography of photographer Francesca Woodman, who took pictures of herself and other young women in rooms just like these until, at the age of 22, she threw herself from the window of her New York apartment on the eve of Ronald Reagan's inauguration in 1981.