Adnan being and time

An expressionistic portrait of Etel Adnan, immersed in her art and the world. Working without ego, Adnan asks, what does it mean to be alive, to live through catastrophe, to experience time.

The Marie Valentine Regan’s portrait of the great Etel Adnan begins in all modesty as a visit: the artist welcomes the filmmaker at the door of her apartment, goes about her affairs; we find her sitting at her desk painting three trees in almost as many brush strokes. She also revisits motifs, as if visiting dear friends.  As visiting means seeing, and seeing often; being or perceiving in time. When a journalist asks her who was the most important person she had ever met, Adnan famously replied: a mountain. In the film, we hear her repeating this anecdote from Journey to Mount Tamalpais, a wonderful book of prose with drawings of the Californian heights she loved visiting and grew to hold as the very core of her being. When Regan filmed her in Paris or in her apartment at Erquy in Brittany during the last ten years of a rich and imposing life, her health no longer allowed her to return to the United States. So Regan took it on herself to bring back images for her. Adnan recognises the reliefs and colours, the morning mist, the pale yellow of late September, and a film of this mountain alone is enough to make her dream. The portrait then transforms into a landscape film, the visit of Mount Adnan travelling to Tamalpais. Gradually, the film fleshes out the question of perception which formed the main subject of her art and writing: a subject that she explained in the words of her friend Ann Rice O’Hanlon: “To perceive…is to be in the process of becoming one with whatever it is, while also becoming separated from it.”

Antoine Thirion