One of the Things That Makes Me Doubt

One of The Things..., exhibited in Martin's survey show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, illuminates a web of images suspended between Martin's own body of film work and her late grandmother's dream diaries. Entries from the diaries - read out by performers featured in her previous films - are matched with outtakes from these ten years' worth of films. One of the Things - complicates the confessional style of the 'video-diary' by slowly shifting the focus from Martin's grandmother to the actors as a central focus, and through subtle dissonances between their readings of the diaries, their desultory comments on them and their voiceless presence in Martin's past films. Started as an outwards journey of parallel discovery of her grandmothers' dream-memories - recorded over thirty years of Jungian analysis - and of Martin's own cinematic histories, the film slowly acquires a dream-like circularity in which archive and imagination blur and the initial synchronicity between films and diaries is disrupted by gaps, divergences and repetitions. The film is a fantastical and spiraling reflection on the performativity of dreaming, and on cinema as an impossible act of witnessing.