Katherine

Resonating Surfaces (2005) is a film by the Dutch artist Manon de Boer. The film consists of interviews with the Brazilian psychoanalyst and theorist Suely Rolnik and reflects on the relationship between power and the body, voice and modes of resistance. Narratives about Rolnik’s experiences of imprisonment under the Brazilian military dictatorship, her intellectual and personal life in 1970s Paris, the role of singing in her native language in her recovery from trauma, the place of voice in her academic research and her eventual return to Brazil are interwoven.

Like other films by de Boer it is shot on 16mm and the materiality of the medium is used deliberately to critique the idea of singular truths and the possibility of representing them. This is done by moving from over to under exposing the film in a way that allow Rolnik’s voice to become more dominant as the complexity of what she is saying grows.

It is one of a series of works by de Boer on female subjects that critique representations of women in film and wider culture. It questions documentary ideas of narrative consistency and the possibility of authentic or fixed memory. This series forms the most complex and political part of de Boer’s oeuvre as it moves beyond considering the body, voice and the materiality of film in purely formal terms.