INCLINATIONS Film Club

Solitude & Maria

Tue 11 June 2024

Book tickets

Wheelchair accessible

A black and white image of Nico's head and shoulders, she is looking up.

“Les Hautes Solitudes” in Solitude (2022) by Nina Danino

Solitude (2022, 72 minutes)

Maria (2023, 80 minutes)

This double bill is the Scottish premiere of two of Nina Danino’s latest films, intimate portraits of two iconic women: Nico and Maria Callas.

SOLITUDE features the singer Nico as an icon, screen and poet. Woven from readings from the Romantic poets, the voice of Nico reciting her lyrics, songs from her dark repertoire, and portraits from the films of Philippe Garrel and Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls together with electronic music from Ash Ra Tempel, guitar by James Creed and original music and arrangements to Nico’s songs by Graham Dowdall AKA Gagarin. Nina Danino delivers an elegy on iconicity, vocality, finitude and solitude.

MARIA is the ecstatic experience of operatic drama, expressive gesture, opulence, despair and sacrifice. The piercing of the voice as it transcends the limits of the body creates for the viewer a landscape of emotion drawn around Maria Callas as a central icon around which the event of the film takes place. “They say that pitch evokes for us a highly charged, primordial cry from out of time, even the calls of animals and birds. It pierces with fury; it fills the theatre stage to resound with the operatic cry.”

Nina Danino

Nina Danino (b. 1955) uses her own voice in experimental film in a long term exploration of the subjective voice as a means of speaking the ‘feminine’ and as forms of self-inscription. Her films are known for her use of the voice reciting her writing and literary texts which created elliptical narratives. She has collaborated with experimental vocalist Shelley Hirsch in “Now I am yours” (1993) which also featured Diamanda Galas. She worked with Tuvan vocalist Sainkho Namtchylak and English soprano Catherine Bott in the sound track for Temenos (1997).