Shirley Bruno
An Excavation of Us - Film - 11min - 2017
presented as part of the exhibition panorama 19
1791, the first year of the Haitian Revolution.
Inside a cave, in black and white, the shadows of Napoleon’s army tumble into a boat, moving about through various dark, textured zones where the water shimmering in their lamps glints even more.
According to legend, the French Army was lured into a mysterious cave by a woman soldier, Marie Jeanne. It was her task to ensnare the enemy. This revolution was to become the most successful slave revolt in history.
This film deals with the way in which history, though imperceptible and varying according to viewpoint, remains inextricably bound up with place, time, and myth. It is the persistence of memory and of experience, penetrated, consumed, then branded on to the collective body.
It is also a film with which we can confront the banal culture of collective forgetfulness, a means of facing the traumas of my ancestors embedded in my body. It is also an invitation to other peoples, a story about us all… A way of contemplating our sins so as to overcome oblivion. Since, once forgotten, history is condemned to repeat itself.
Shirley Bruno
Shirley is a Haitian-American filmmaker living between New York City, Haiti, and France. She worked as a documentary filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist before going to the London Film School in the UK where she graduated with an MA with Distinction in Filmmaking. Her narrative shorts have been screened internationally in Europe, Canada, the Caribbean, and the US. Shirley is the recipient of the prestigious New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a recipient of the New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Grant. Her films often deal with the space between generations, closeness and loneliness within a family, and the things left unsaid that mark us.
