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.
All biographies are exercises in fancy, equal parts guesswork, mystery, desire, and longing.
Speculative biography is Subrin's favorite territory, and she uses it as a launching pad for a brand of feminist video history that obsesses over the past in order to reconcile it to the present. Her first video, 1995's Swallow, explores depression and eating disorders through the fictional biography of a contemporary Bostonian teen against the footage backdrop of '70s feminism. Likewise, Woodman is the subject of The Fancy, but we never see her or any of her photographs. We hear descriptions of the bodies in the photographs, yet we are left to confront their absence from our sight. We are taken to buildings where she lived and buildings where she was taught, the camera lingering with remarkable ghostly stillness in vacant classrooms, science labs, and art studios.