Like Grains of Sand Falling: Films by Jytte Rex

This November, Spectacle is proud to present the first-ever U.S. survey of Danish-born experimental filmmaker and artist Jytte Rex.

While she is rightly regarded as a major living artist in Europe with a CV of important feminist artworks dating back to the 1970s and longstanding gallery, Rex’s films have never been available to see in the United States. In hopes of remedying this blind spot, Spectacle offers New Yorkers a first-ever chance to see her noted features ISOLDE (1989) and MIRRORS OF THE PLANET (1992, which played as a one-off at Spectacle in 2013) plus more recent works like THE RIVER (2003), SILK ROAD (2004), and the newly subtitled THE GIRL WITH THE PLAIT (2005), alongside her most recent video SEARCH – LIMBO (2022). Many of these have been scanned and/or subtitled under Rex’s supervision for the purposes of this series.

From her freewheeling dual adaptation of Borges in THE MEMORIOUS, the cosmically focused ghost-story MIRRORS OF THE PLANET to her updated retelling of classic tragedy in ISOLDE, Rex’s is a cinema that flirts with death. At once baroque and gothic while also clinical and exacting, her films invite audiences into the headspaces of characters who are near death, perhaps already taking their first steps into the afterlife or, likelier still, somewhere in between. Embracing mystery and eschewing narrative conventions, Rex’s work is imbued with a Tarkovskian sensibility, featuring quotidian video-diaries, unsettling found-footage, and private fears drawn from a lifetime of looking. Rex’s keen musical palette profoundly attunes the viewer’s attention in montages and tableaux equal parts impossible to describe and to forget.

​​The essence of the film (MIRRORS OF THE PLANET) can be expressed with Dante’s words: