Super 8 B&W/Sound      3mins 12 secs

One of a number of films in which words and phrases are randomly chosen from specific texts and later rearranged to form a voiceover to each piece. For Girl in a Taxicab, Dogra-Brazell deliberately chose a text she had read over twenty years ago and was almost certain to have forgotten. She could not be sure whether the structure she built from parts (a tapestry of overlapping sentences) retained any of the book’s original causality. When the visuals start to fade halfway through the film, the visual and verbal screens come together in a screen of trauma. The story, like any story, becomes symptomatic of a kind of forgetting. In contrast, the ambient sound for this film was recorded in New York a month after 9/11.

Girl in a Taxicab is held in the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection currently housed at Central St.Martins College of Art and Design.

Screening History:

2016 Chronicle of a Sound:The Films of Julia Dogra-Brazell, Uplink, Tokyo, Japan
2008 Light Divided (part of exhibition series Art After Dark) Louise T. Blouin Foundation, London