The Wake

“Sign this or you will be burned alive.” Her breathing halts, her eyes glisten with unblinking anguish, and her face throbs numbly as she slowly and deliberately twists her head first to one side, then to the other. An excruciatingly low, morbid drone of electrostatic and dragging metal makes the walls quiver. “Even if you part my soul from my body, I will confess nothing.”

The gruesome scene depicted above is The Prisoner, an intensely dark and emotive 12 minutes and 26 seconds of cinematic experience by Minneapolis artist Abinadi Meza, raises harrowing questions about the implications of captive interrogation, asking the audience to reflect upon a series of questions and answers within a suffocating space. The film is an emotionally stirring remix of Carl Dreyer’s famous silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. Meza re-rendered the film as a poetically grim animation by meticulously tracing thousands of frames from the original film into something evocative of a living and breathing screen print. He has also composed a chilling, new soundtrack.

Meza was drawn to Dreyer’s piece for its rich history as well as its potential for contemporary relevance. The original 1928 depiction of the trial and death of Joan of Arc was subject to numerous denunciations and mutilations. Initially, the French despised the idea that a Dane had interpreted the history of their beloved warrior-maiden, and the English censored the piece for its negative depiction of the all-powerful council

of judges. Less than a year after the film’s release, the original negative was burned in a fire. Dreyer attempted to recreate the film using alternate takes, but this version was also believed lost to fire. In 1981, a significantly damaged but complete copy of Dreyer’s original edit was found in the closet of a mental institution in Oslo, Norway. Through digital restoration the “Oslo print” was miraculously re-introduced as La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc to a contemporary audience in exquisite, near-original form.

By presenting The Prisoner as an animation, Meza offers a dramatic filter through which the audience hypnotically absorbs the piece’s heart-wrenching content. This particular style of animation lends itself quite well to Meza’s interest in “breathing new life into something familiar.” Meza describes The Prisoner in the interview as an investigation of “unanswerable questions with fatal consequences.” Meza’s heroine is ensnared in a morose test of righteousness delivered by a menacingly smug council of despotic white-haired men.

Among his influences for this piece, Meza cites Dadaism as well as Butoh, an intensely expressive, visceral form of Japanese dance. The Prisoner is a fitting taste of Meza’s recent work in that he often uses texts as a starting point. His body of work also includes sound installations, performances, and other new media artworks.

The Prisoner is showing as part of Franklin Art Works current exhibition, which also features paintings by Adam Cvijanovic (exploring the imagined chaos for the end of gravity), as well as Andrew Kuo’s intricately laced screen prints. The exhibition runs through March 25. Stop into Franklin Art Works anytime Wednesday through Saturday between noon and 5 p.m.