Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
'Leslie Thornton has long been considered a pioneer of contemporary media aesthetics, working at the borders and limits of cinema, video and digital media. Such seminal works as her ongoing series Peggy and Fred in Hell (1985- ) operate in the interstices between various media-forms, often using simultaneous, interacting projections of film and video to address both the architectural spaces of media, and the imaginary spaces of the spectator’s involvement. Thornton uses the process of production as an explorative process, a collective endeavor “position(ing) the viewer as an active reader, not a consumer.” She is a contemporary of such fellow explorers as Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Gary Hill, Michael Snow, Alan Sondheim and Harun Farocki, all artists who are opening up new spaces for media, re-mapping its boundaries within the projective spaces of the museum or gallery as well as within the public spaces of the cinema, television and internet transmission. Thornton’s career to date has been a unique and unusual one. She was one of the first artists to bridge the boundaries between cinema and video, to explore their complicities and resistances, and to embrace their differences as positive, and even complementary, attributes. Thornton’s complex articulations are both edifying innovations in media form and content and tacit deconstructions of the principles, presumptions and promises of technically reproducible artworks. Her projects are ongoing and provisional, and she had been unafraid to return to, and rework, and rethink, issues, topics, subjects. Her works have had a profound impact, and an enduring influence on an entire generation of media artists, critics and theorists.
'"Her work found its first location, and inspiration, in what in those times was understood as an ‘avant-garde’ film practice; the quoted term, suspiciously suspended, is rarely invoked in these times, but the rigor, the pure oppositional avowal, and the belief in moving imagery’s electro-shock potential evinced in her work insist on its essence and instincts to be one with those of what now seems undeniable as the classical genius of, first, American, and second, transnational, non-industrial cinema, in the questioning, ransacking mode familiar since having filled one of the spaces left vacant (gaping) after modernism moved away from here."-- Bill Horrigan
'One of Leslie Thornton’s earliest interests was mathematics, a fascination that was encouraged by her father Gunnar Thornton, a nuclear physicist and engineer, and her grandfather, an electrical engineer. During the Second World War both men had–unbeknownst to each other–worked on the Manhattan Project, the top secret development of the atomic bomb. Gunnar Thornton was one of the youngest scientists working on the project. He had determined, while still a student, that an important new frontier in scientific research was probably well underway, and that it would be his chosen area of research. His professors at Harvard were evasive or noncommittal, but inference and persistence paid off, and Gunnar Thornton was brought into the project early on. His father, Jens Thornton, was the electrical engineer whose task had been to design the electrical plant at Oak Ridge where the methods of refining radioactive materials were developed. It wasn’t until after the cessation of hostilities that the men discovered–through an article in a local Boston newspaper–that they had both been working on the Manhattan Project. “I had always wondered,” remarked a family member, “why, for a couple of years, these two men, who were so passionately involved in science, only talked to each other about sports when they were home, a topic they weren’t even very much interested in.”
'Perhaps it is within this context that, even as a child, Leslie Thornton began to develop certain insights regarding technology and ethics, language and silence, and a sensitivity and attentiveness to the contradictions, ironies, and ambivalences between localized actions and global events. How was it possible to reconcile the brilliant, gentle man she loved and admired with the revelation of the consequences that ensued in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Both images are true: he, Gunnar, was a man of character and ethics, who believed in the peaceful development of atomic energy, yet whose work had played a role in the shaping of an anxious and dangerous future. Thornton’s dark and magisterial Peggy and Fred in Hell, in its strange divarications between promissory terror and transcendence, might be read as a profound examination of the tropologies of cold-war apocalyptics, the vicissitudes of conflicting narratives, and what one might call a certain paratactics of the image. Peggy and Fred in Hell charts a troubled trajectory between event and mediation, with a profound skepticism throughout concerning the favored foregroundings of technical modernity: photography’s verisimilitude and the index of the photo-chemical trace as guarantor of the real, the consequent presumption of a privileged link to the true and actual, and the promise of recuperability through ever-extenuating forms of technical reproducibility. She finds suspect the naturalization of prosthetic instruments, and the political interests behind certain orders of narratological closure. Thornton has an almost tragic sense of loss, of what is incommensurate in technologies of the image, of the impossibilities and aporias circumscribed by language and in media, a sense of what is profoundly irrecuperable and inconsumable. And a very strange relation to cinema, its histories and practices.
'Recently Thornton has begun making larger scale installations related to Peggy and Fred in Hell, which she refers to as “environments.” Utilizing fragments from already accomplished sections of this work, mixed with newly produced sections from the 30 hours of archived footage she has shot, and with new or found footage, she has constructed a series of site-specific works. Using multiple screens and transmissions, they are a natural development of Peggy and Fred in Hell, which used simultaneous interacting film video and audio projections, which forgrounded their habitation of specific spaces. In these recent media installations she uses three registers (precisely edited loops of differing durations) which are ‘mixed,’ almost as one would music, producing a resonant three-month-long para-narrative work. The different loops are precisely edited and set to play in a randomized phase pattern so that no repetitions occur between the three registers of images on screen over the course of their exhibition, producing a tacitly self-editing work, an ‘artificial intelligence’ allegorizing itself.
'Thornton’s exploration of an intermittent episodic structure in Peggy and Fred in Hell, in her site-specific installations, and in The Great Invisible are, in an important sense, one of the most direct articulations of the problematics of media’s artifactuality in confrontation with its forms of transmission, dissemination and distribution. Media’s strange economies, reflecting a globalized and dispersed data-space far different from the traditional projective/consumptive spaces of cinema and television, become an integral axis of Thornton’s formal and conceptual working. Her works are variable, ‘mixed’ and dispersed across time, they punctuate a given architectural space or context, they are permeable and plural, stable within their instabilities. In this they reflect, and engage, a deep substrate of media, one which has always been the case, and which has always been suppressed: that technical reproducibility in and of itself, is both uncontainable and uncontaining, and that, moreover, it becomes, in itself, a structuring principle of subsequent media. As Leslie Thornton is well aware, this does not abnegate what of the world passes through mediation, but inflects and reflects upon that passage in fundamental ways. In this sense her works are also a tacit and critical link between both contemporary digital dataspaces and the tradition of formal, technical, aesthetic, and theoretical innovation within and between media.'-- Thomas Zummer
___
Stills
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
___
Further
Leslie Thornton @ Senses of Cinema
Leslie Thornton @ Video Data Bank
Video: Leslie Thornton works @ Crane.tv
'Hell Is for Children: ED HALTER ON LESLIE THORNTON’S PEGGY AND FRED IN HELL'
Leslie Thornton's films on Ubuweb
'The Kaleidoscopic Visions of Leslie Thornton'
'Leslie Thornton by Feliz Lucia Molina'
'ARTIST IN FOCUS: Leslie Thornton'
Leslie Thornton's movies on MUBI
'Leslie Thornton. Aesthetics of uncertainty'
Leslie Thornton @ Strictly Film School
'Constant Discovery: Leslie Thornton’s ‘Radical Symmetry’'
'horror film 1: shanghai blue', by Leslie Thornton
'For the Hell of It'
'Worn Story', by Leslie Thornton
___
Extras
Leslie Thornton. Looking and Seeing: "I Like to Watch". 2012
Midnight Moment May 2014: Leslie Thornton, Binocular Menagerie
Serpentine Galleries Park Nights 2013: Leslie Thornton & James Richards
Cognac Wellerlane interviews Artist Leslie Thornton at Winkleman Gallery
_____
Interview
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Irene Borger: I’ll begin with a quote from you, Leslie. “My own interest is in the outer edge of narrative where we are at the beginning of something else.” What led you, at this time as an art maker, to de-stabilize the narrative?
Leslie Thornton: That grew out of a kind of dislocation for me. The way language works has been a life-long preoccupation, starting in childhood when I was painfully shy and had trouble speaking. The kind of extreme self-focus of shyness, the kind of analysis and appraisal that is nearly constant, and in a way objectifies language, even for a child. Language is something outside. Speech was like an object, an enemy, a barrier. It was externalized. Language was overwhelming, inadequate to describe or convey many things – I had a basic sense of this in childhood. Much later, when I began to study linguistics and also semiotics, I found an intellectualization of something I had already been struggling with – the point being that I didn’t get there through a predominantly intellectual process. Then came more complicated questions about culture and language, how culture is embedded in language. Which led – it’s not a linear process exactly – to concerns about the dynamic nature of any one culture and cultural proximities and crossing-over, change. I think my own estrangement from speech has very much shaped all of my work, and may account for some of its qualities, because it’s deeply rooted emotionally for me.
IB: I’m stuck on this phrase: “to de-stabilize the narrative”. To even question form in the way that you’re interested in is unnerving because it questions a core of the way we learn to think. The reason that [divergence] is so threatening to people is because it doesn’t operate according to the conventional structures or habits of the mind.
LT: Yes, culture as narrative. The mind as narrative. Narrative reflects specific cultural presumptions. Recognizing that, one can’t help but think: then there must be other possibilities for narrative – reflecting other times and places and agendas, past, present, and future. I’m not capable of an involvement in the dominant forms of narrative in cinema, for instance. To study, it feels oppressive and limiting. I choose to be engaged on another, perhaps more critical and intuitive side. But on this other side, there’s a potential for ecstasy that I don’t think you find in conventional forms.
IB: Why is it that ecstasy becomes possible?
LT: It is probably the case that thought is largely structured like language. But, there is a kind of thinking outside of language that can surface sometimes, especially in art-making, probably in a lot of other arenas as well. Intangible, erotic, intuitive, pre-verbal, but precise. Those moments are extremely pleasurable, frightening, or stimulating.
I’ve been reading and thinking about mysticism lately, because of the film I’m working on, The Great Invisible (2002) [about a 19th century woman, Isabelle Eberhardt, who passes herself off as a man and becomes an exalted Sufi in North Africa]. Every form of mystical practice involves techniques for reaching an ecstatic state. However, couched in religious or philosophical terminology, the process is usually body-related and could involve exhaustion, a lot of repetition, a lot of movement, and music or rhythms. One’s physical and psychic environment becomes de-familiarized. I think I use a related strategy in film to produce a heightened experience. I will work with a familiar trope like suspense, or anticipation, and then just keep pushing that button, without the expected next step or resolution. There is a familiar residue of narrative form. The exciting part is then bringing in other elements that aren’t familiar at all but that are saturating to the viewer.
IB: Like what?
LT: Illogical things, mispronunciations, peculiar combinations of sound and image that are somehow startling, excessive beauty. Working with duration that seems inappropriate. The viewer has to deal with it; it stimulates the mind to cope with boredom, for instance. Generally, in culture these discomforts, stimulations, are blocked out; they are not speakable, packageable, or they are disruptive. The closest to transcendence that we get in pop culture might be violence, the lust for violence.
IB: There are many roots into trance-making but there are two poles, even in meditation practice. One is a saturation, the other is the ascetic. In our culture, you seem to be saying, we just use the mode of over-stimulation.
LT: Probably there are similar things going cognitively at either extreme. I’m interested in boredom. My interest comes out of the experience of the most hardcore structuralist films from the ’60s and ’70s. I think these films often produced profound boredom, which forced you somewhere else. None of the artists or critics would ever say that [laughter] but in a way, watching three hours of the camera whirling around in a barren landscape, as in Snow’s La Règion centrale (1971), you have a profound response, if you commit to stay. You feel you’ve had a life-changing experience. A voluntary experience of boredom. The mind becomes very active. All kinds of images and scenarios begin to play. I think of John Cage too.
IB: I was just thinking of him.
LT: There’s a kind of mystical aspect to this.
IB: Are you saying that in your way of making films you’re very conscious of the experiential aspect for the spectator?
LT: I think that’s my main focus. And, as the stand-in spectator, I have to judge by the intensity of my own responses. It’s a thinking and feeling moment, where the thinking and the feeling – we don’t have a word for it – when they can’t be separated. That’s the moment I’m always looking for. It’s not something that comes back to rational formations or very focused arguments or ideas. It’s about a spreading out, spreading and coagulations, chemical reactions in the work that can produce surprising moments and thoughts for the viewer. It’s also important for me that the work not just be addressed to an “enlightened” or experienced audience. I’m trying to make things that are stimulating to watch at the same time that a critical voice is operating.
IB: If people are not used to looking at structures that differ from the beginning/middle/end of the classical Aristotelian scheme, how could they learn to enter your work?
LT: Seeing things more than once helps. Seeing that there is a kind of pattern or structure across several works. Talking about it. Relaxing. Often the people who are having the most difficulty are my colleagues, and not, let’s say, an audience off the street.
IB: Why?
LT: Conflicting agendas or aesthetics. The crowd that bothers me is the visual artists, the art people who don’t get into this kind of work and say they watch films for entertainment only. And the fine arts system that supports one-liner video installations, but can’t deal with anything more complex. Avant-garde film and video take up similar issues to those in the art world, yet there’s very little acknowledgement of this. The film or video work can be more sophisticated, more developed conceptually, yet media remains the most marginalized of the art forms. It’s an orphan. Because media is associated with entertainment and information systems, it’s not perceived as a formal artistic medium. The apparatus per se is limited by the conventions for its use. Photography went through this stage in the 19th century. Experimental media belongs within the history of art. Photographers fought for recognition. I think media artists haven’t done enough to try to change the system, but they are up against something huge. And now the preoccupation with “new” technologies – that has really become the bandwagon. It will take a long time to sort out what’s of value here.
______________
8 of Leslie Thornton's 37 films
____________
X-TRACTS (1975)
'This was my first 16mm film, made with Desmond Horsfield. For the image we created a gridded score of movements, both within the frame ('subject moves right to left') and between the camera and the subject (zooms, pans, tilts...,) using this as a shooting script. The sound was derived from an old journal, read out loud and then cut-up into the same units of time as the image, ranging from 3 seconds to 1/4 second. Assembling the material was largely mechanical, following the predetermined score. That a tonal portrait of a person emerges was an after effect; we thought of the film as a structural or indexical system of sound/image relations, and viewed the soundtrack as a linguistic experiment, working with the building blocks of speech.'-- LT
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(Watch the entire film)
_____________
Adynata (1983)
'A formal 1861 portrait of a Chinese Mandarin and his wife is the starting point for this allegorical investigation of the fantasies spawned in the West about the East, particularly that which associates femininity with the mysterious Orient. ADYNATA presents a series of oppositions-male and female images, past and present sounds-which in and of themselves construct a minimal and fragmentary narrative, an open text of our imaginations, fears and fantasies.'-- Women Make Movies
the entire film
______________
Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue (1985)
'Peggy And Fred In Hell is one of the strangest cinematic artifacts of the last 20 years, revealing the abuses of history and innocence in the face of catastrophe, as it chronicles two small children journeying through a post-apocalyptic landscape to create their own world. Breaking genre restrictions, Thornton uses improvisation, planted quotes, archival footage and formless timeframes to confront the viewer's preconceptions of cause and effect. "At its most distinctive, as in the endless and eternal Peggy And Fred In Hell cycle, Thornton’s work wanders past the medium’s limits and finds the medium’s origins.” —Bill Horrigan, Wexner Center'-- collaged
Excerpt
_____________
Dung Smoke Enters the Palace (1989)
'An anti-narrative adventure traveling through a phantasmagoric environment void of stability. The video presents a bizarre compendium of archival and industrial footage accompanied by a noisy soundtrack of music and voices from the past, as if echoing the ether of the viewer’s mind. Thornton’s distinctive visual style of collaging random elements elicits an eerie sense of being lost amidst past and present, breeding a confusion that complicates any clear reading of the image.'-- Video Data Bank
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(Watch an excerpt here)
_____________
Strange Space (1994)
'Thornton asks viewers to question how one sees “space"—whether literally or figuratively— and what is being revealed? Images of a sonogram session grant viewers access to what is typically reserved for medical analysis—“inner space.” The body, probed and revealed through technology, is collaged with imagery from lunar probes, drawing parallels with how technology also allows us to see where we were previously unable—“outer space.” A poem by Rilke about the interior quality of thought is contrasted with the clinical voice accompanying the images.'-- Video Data Bank
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
(Watch an excerpt here)
____________
The Last Time I Saw Ron (1994)
'Made in memory of the actor and my friend, Ron Vawter. Ron passed away shortly after the opening performances of the play "Philoktetes Variations," directed by Jan Ritsema and co-authored by Ritsema and Vawter. It was produced by the Kaaitheater in Brussels. All of the images in this video were originally created for the play.'-- LT
the entire film
______________
Photography Is Easy (2010)
'In the ongoing project Photography is Easy, Thornton continues her investigation of the production of meaning through media such as photography, film and video. Thornton and a companion are seen hiking through a desert, photographing and recording the journey. Shots of desert landscapes are overlaid with the artist’s running commentary and text about Thornton’s experience of making a photograph. Questioning the value of the rarified image, Thornton investigates the porous boundaries between the still and the moving image.'-- Electronic Arts Intermix
the entire film
_____________
LUNA Trance (2013)
'"Coined the “Eiffel Tower of Brooklyn,” the legendary Parachute Jump at Coney Island was built in 1939 for the World’s Fair in Queens. In a moving image triptych exploring nature and technology, memory and place, Thornton follows swarming seagulls through three iterations of the same image to her imaginary space—a whole new universe, she’s said, that’s much different from the world we live in." - Artsy. LUNA is based on a single image of the decommissioned Parachute Jump in Coney Island, with seagulls swarming the structure. The iconic image is digitally re-processed to embody different eras of cinematic and televisual imagery, beginning in 1900 and leading into our present. The artifice of the digital image is accompanied, haunted, by actual (authentic) archival sound recordings spanning the same period, beginning with early Edison recordings. LUNA moves through six variations on a theme, in poetic traces that cross the span of a century.'-- collaged
Excerpt
*
p.s. Hey. ** ASH, Hey there, Ash! It's great to see you, man! Oh, very cool that you'll come to the 'LCTG' screening in Brighton. Zac and I will be there to introduce the film and do a q&a and stuff. I figured you would have done Euroheedfest before. Huh. Yeah, every year I'm dying to go, and circumstances always conspire against that, it sucks. Yeah, I'll try to pre-plan for next year. The new GbV? I've only listened to it once so far because I'm over my head with work, but I think it's really exciting. What do you think? Awesome to get to talk, pal. ** Jamie McMorrow, Hi, Glaswegian! Parisian here. I think it might just be the tiniest bit less wintry today, but it's too early to tell. My Tuesday was work, work, and more work. Heavy crunch time. That and meeting with Zac to work together for a while was it. Productive, at least. Well, we have to turn in the finished proposal to ARTE at the beginning of May. Then they will take six weeks to decide if they want to go further with us. So, there'll be a lag after the submission. Yeah, it would be really great if they buy it for all kinds of reasons. I think it's pretty fucking good, if I don't say so myself, but I have no clue what TV people think is pretty fucking good. Our thing is weird and unusual-ish, but it's pretty entertaining and not obscure or transgressive or anything. Harold Jaffe is an interesting writer, yeah. His stuff is really flat and factual seeming on the surface, but it's complicated inside. It's good. I think springing for that book is probably a good deal. I haven't read 'Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton', and I need to. Oh, I've liked things by Sheila Heti. I don't that one though. Wait, you got that job? Whoa, that's cool. So, will you need to relocate for it? Awesome, congrats! Really interesting about Eilshemius. I didn't get a chance to investigate him yet due to the work swamp. I definitely will. My Wednesday is going to be basically like yesterday but with a different name, but I hope yours holds unexpected fun. Love, Dennis. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. Eileen is everywhere these days. She's such a star. That's so deserved and awesome. You guys are going to be scattered at sea route? I still have this weird wanting to be buried thing, I don't know why. Good morning back to you, sir! ** Sypha, Hi, James! Good to see you, man. I missed you. But it sounds like you were very fruitfully occupied. Very excited to hear the new album. So curious to hear what your current music making interests are. Great! Obviously, I'm happy you're liking the Gide. Like you know, that book was very big for me when I read it. Celine is really great, and there kind of couldn't be an any more different a kind of writer from Gide than him, which is cool and also a terribly constructed sentence. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi, D! I don't know how those things work either, and I've had a whole life of trying to figure that out. I guess they're just ... (cue moody music) ... one of life's great mysteries. Diary-like sounds good. Diary-like is cool because it can be cool for what it is and it can also be like storage room full of stuff you can use for something less diaristic work later. If that makes sense. I'm think that joining the 'thesis delaying' group must be a little relaxing for you at least. No, my day was stuffed with work. As will be today. Oh well. Tomorrow an old friend of mine from LA comes to Paris, so at least I'll get to be forced to break up the work spate to hang out with him. What was Wednesday like? ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. 'Olio' was a real discovery for me. Very good, I think, and I think that new Lily Hoang book is the best thing I've read by her. I forgot to ask Zac yesterday because my head got so clouded and burnt by work, but I'm seeing him in a while, and I wrote a note myself to ask him. Gisele's gone, but she gets back tomorrow, and I'll ask her when I see her. The only tip I can think of in the meantime is The Boros Collection. If you don't know it, it's this collector's contemporary art collection stored/viewable in this amazing old WWII bunker. They give guided tours. You have to make an RSVP in advance. It's a nice thing to do, and its worth it just for checking out the building itself, which is great. Zac's and I just finished our 'final' draft of Episode 1. Gisele is reading it, and then we'll make a final draft after consulting with her. Today we're finishing our version of Episode 2 to send to her. We're maybe half-way through finishing the synopsis for the 3rd Episode (we only have to submit a synopsis of it for now). Then we have do the overall synopsis, statement of intent, logline, etc., which is the worst part of the work. All by this weekend, so we're a bit crazed. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Yeah, right? I found his stuff recently, and it's pretty fresh and electric. 'Frazzled' is a great way to describe it. He's also a very strange painter and records very strange albums. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. That sounds fairly promising about 'High Rise'. I don't even know who Tim Hiddleston is, I don't think, or not by name. Cool, thanks a lot! ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Wow, 73. Just based on your descriptions, she sounds younger. Nice. Pride sounds like a perfectly rational response. Heck, I don't even know the dude, and I feel pride. Of course those work guys are ugly trolls with nothing better to do with their miniature piles of brain cells. Well, I mean, yeah, it seems like it was pills, but we'll see. But it does seem like it. So sucks. I don't really care how he died, I just hate that he did. I was lucky to see Prince live the first time really early, just before 'Controversy' came out, at this small, weird gig at a now-defunct roller rink in West Hollywood. I didn't know anything about him. I mostly just went because I thought seeing a gig in a roller rink sounded fun. ** H, Hi. Me too, about the film. We're supposed to meet with our new producer about our next film in the next few days, and we're itching to start working on it. Thank you about the books post, and have most pleasure-filled day whatever that entails. ** Okay. D.l. tender prey recently saw a film by Leslie Thornton in London, and his reporting back about that inspired me to make a post devoted to her terrific films. I hope you enjoy it. See you tomorrow.