ARTISTS TALKING

Anna Sanders is a prolific filmmaker that never was. She’s an umbrella that conceals a fluidly dynamic film collective that transcends the confines of artform in order “to elude representation and replace it with presentation... to create a piece of reality instead of art”. Anna Sanders is a composite and complex character only hinted at within the pages of this book, but the glossy images and the brief texts ultimately can’t show her. The mystery stays intact on finishing the book and will stay unsolved until you meet Sanders in the films themselves.

This book shows the multiplicity of Anna Sanders and these layers of truth and misdirection are repeated within the films. And it is no more ‘truly’ represented than in the film The Third Memory by Pierre Huyghe. The film refers to Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon starring Al Pacino which is also based on a real-life bank robbery by John Wojtowicz. The Third Memory gives Wojtowicz the opportunity to recount his version of the truth, and thirty years on in a recreated set of the bank, he takes us through what really happened. This is the heart of Anna Sanders. Reality and fiction become meaningless in this work. Who holds the truth – Sidney Lumet, Al Pacino, John Wojtowicz, Pierre Huyghe? What would the bank manager or tellers, victims of a violent crime, have to say about the truth?

The narrative of ‘reality’ when translated to cinema highlights what is true about how we perceive it. There is no one truth; there isn’t just one perspective. The films of Anna Sanders leave us questioning our position within our own narratives. Do we really possess the truth of our own stories? Or is it only by ignoring the network of narratives that surround our own that we construct that truth?
Published by Forma
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