Since our home is now Glasgow and no longer Paris, I have sadly missed the Cinémorphe performances and listen with envy to descriptions of them from a friend who was there.
Romilly recently sent me a link to view her short films which I love; Bump, Wednesday’s Words.
Under the veneer of wonderful wit and snappy pace, deeper emotions reach you. Made with a simple hand held camera they are wonderful traces of what she has lived, filled with her closest friends, I imagine the fun she would have had making them and it makes me reflect on precious times spent making and performing with others and the wonder of how life’s random interruptions and fragile conditions intensify the final performance. This was what she enjoyed.
Romilly stars in an early short film I made in 1998. It was November when we did the filming in a studio /flat at la Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris where I was living at the time. Romilly had recently moved to Paris, Carmela Uranga had generously leant me her Super-8 camera for the shoot and another artist from la Cite, Zillah Engeran, had also agreed to be filmed.
The short film later became known as Sleeping Bag and Zillah was going to be in the bag for the shoot while Romilly would watch over. These were all the instructions I had given them. The film was silent so it didn’t matter that Zillah was giggling a lot from inside the bag but what was remarkable in Romilly was her ability to bottle her mirth and give an intense performance. There is a crucial moment during the film where Romilly takes a deep breath as she lives herself into the part. I treasure this recording of her as Romilly gives the work its entire gravitas.
In 1998 when I first got to know her, we were sitting in her Montmartre flat chatting over coffee and after much cajoling she eventually read me an excerpt from a theatre play she was writing. I remember how I gasped internally at the beauty of her text. The last time was in 2012 when a euphoric crowd of us found ourselves at a cafe terrace outside Carmela’s flat in the small hours of the morning following a hugely successful Ten event. Perry and Mark sang and passed the guitar between them and we all had such a laugh.
(Sleeping Bag, Super8, silent 10mins, was shown as a film installation in an international exhibition ‘Des Territoires’ at l’Ecole des Beaux Arts in 2001-2 and later at Tramway Glasgow in 2003).