ABSTRACT
Turim examines the conceptual relationship between gardens and filmmaking in the works of two women filmmakers, one a foundational work in US experimental filmmaking and the other a creatively shot art documentary. Marie Menken’s 16 mm, five-minute, color film, Glimpse of the Garden, 1957, is compared to Rosalind Nashashibi’s Vivian’s Garden, 2017, which narrates the lives of a pair of artists, Elisabeth Wild and Vivian Suter, in a Guatemalan garden enclave, as a refuge from historical political displacement. New research on Dwight Ripley’s garden as Menken’s source couples with close analysis of Menken’s camerawork and editing in the first half of the chapter. The context of Documenta 14 as soliciting the documentary, the life stories of Wild and Suter as refugees, and the background of Guatemalan politics join with close analysis of Nashashibi’s aesthetic strategies in the second half. Each of the gardens is a unique inscription of what a garden space can be, and the chapter concludes by highlighting the sense of artistic collaboration in both films and gardens as well as the shared belief of the filmmakers and artists in abstracted visual expression, the poetic power of fragments and gestures for which the garden serves as a sustaining space.
