A film about language, about the way trauma inflects grief, and about learning to speak with the dead. This work engages a personal archive of children’s books owned by my late mother, many of which feature her signature. I had encountered Deanna Bowen’s “sum of the parts: what can be named” (2010), which attuned me to the lasting power of these traces, so I began to think of the signatures as a connection to my mother. I decided to use them to perform a kind of ad-hoc seance where I learned to copy her signature exactly. This forgery opened me up to other vectors of memory: A pedagogical dance, Koko the Gorilla, an old episode of Reading Rainbow. I used these elements to explore the ways that trauma interferes in the process of grieving, and the ways abuse shapes memory. “A current of rage undergirds Derek B. Jenkins’s As close as your voice can call (2023), in which the filmmaker revisits children’s books that had belonged to his deceased mother. Between archival footage of Koko the gorilla and of the composer Kirk Nurock conducting elementary school students in rhythmic hollering, a subtitle reads: “Most linguists agree that what Koko was doing was not language. And it certainly wasn’t ASL. Koko learned how to give them what they wanted. They say she learned how to give them what they wanted in over 400 ways.” In no frivolous way, and with no guaranteed valence, the film asserts that faith in the speech of another can be aided by actions of repetition and insistence.” — Lauren Lee, Prismatic Ground 2024
