Anna Thew | Eros Erosion / 1990

it could have been as simple as that

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anna Thew (director) Eros Erosion / 1990

 

In this 45 minute “image poem,” Anna Thew explores the pandemic of AIDS through the 1990 lens and voices of individuals suffering from the disease, several of whom later died, as well as brief segments from Boccaccio’s Decameron, a poem By Wei Wen Ti, as well as other invocative fragments. As Thew herself wrote about the impetus for this film:

     "Eros Erosion began as two words jotted over a drawing of a river. It grew from there. Words, jottings over drawings, another friend had AIDS, conversations, struggle, the futile pursuit of miracle treatments… the only thing I could do was film people fighting and arguing, film landscape, film the sea, and try and make some sense of that helplessness you feel."

          Although her film is definitely not narrative—paralleling the disease with images of World War II bombings of the British landscape, decaying city streets and buildings, empty shipyards and vessels, and various views of sea, birds, and trees in order to invoke the sense of time and decay—the director also does create small narrative segments such as the murder by the two brothers of the Decameron’s Lisabetta’s lover and images of couples arguing, battling, and making love which the viewer can certainly imagine as scenes such individuals played out before and after coming to terms with the realization of the disease.

    Repeated phrases, moreover, such “It is no use to put one’s head in the sand,” “over the safety net,” “a kind of love/death thing,” and “it could have been as simple as that,” among others, call out for imaginative incidents in which these words might have been appropriately spoken.

      And ultimately, this work is permeated more by a sense of regret and acceptance rather than anger or terror—although obviously those emotions are implied in some of the film’s scenes.

      As in so many gay and lesbian narratives, mirror images and Narcissus are called upon to hint at the queer search for the other, as well as the myths and literary tales of Orfeo, Ulysses, and Dante.

 

     Buses, trains, ships, and the sea itself come to represent transport both to places to which those suffering from AIDS still express their hopes to travel, to describe from where they have come, and, of course, to signify the voyage into death itself.

     The images from the film I’ve included above are organized almost randomly, much the way they often appear in the film, although obviously the pattern I created is missing the rhythm and the important use of sound in Thew’s film.

     Voicing and performing this short work are Ali Zaidi, Carlyle Reedy, David Medalla, Julian Woropay, Christian Anstice, Gina Czarnecki, Anna Malni, Anna Thew, Junior Corsini, Simon Periton, Toni Dominici, Philippe Barbut, Jean Pascal Auberge, and Franco Bosisio.

     Thew also has expressed her feelings about the end of this evocative film: “For me, the film remains unfinished. It ends in hiatus with a shot of the Alps from the plane to Rome. Atilio died before it was printed, followed by Kosmo, Alf, Stuart and Derek.”

 

Los Angeles, February 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).