Les quatre récits d’Alice

In Les quatre récits d’Alice, Myriam Jacob-Allard explores a story that, because of its persistence, has become part of family lore. The story, told countless times by her grandmother Alice, is an implausible tale of the time, when she was a child, a hurricane worthy of The Wizard of Oz picked her up and sent her flying. Four videos, whose pictures are split in two, show images documenting tornados and hurricanes taken from the internet or from disaster films on one side, and on the other side, the artist reading a weather forecast against an amateurish green background. Here Jacob-Allard lip syncs the story told by her grandmother. A montage/collage of images to her left flows past to illustrate the story. The visual codes of the television weather forecast quickly become secondary to the four different versions of her grandmother’s story, which kept changing over the years and which Jacob-Allard recorded over a ten-year period. Les quatre récits d’Alice, in its many offshoots, becomes a kind of essay on memory, passing on, and belonging. By lip-syncing the various versions of Alice’s tale, Jacob-Allard makes the story her own. (France Choinière)

This screening is part of Tongue Takeover, the first chapter of the online program Takeover curated by Julian Ross for e-flux Video & Film, and unfolding in six chapters between September 22 and December 15, 2022, with the films and videos of each chapter streaming for two weeks.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.