The Amateur and the Archive

“An amateur is a lover,” Nathaniel Dorsky proposes in a passage recited early in Heavenly and Harrowing (2024). The older meaning of “amateur,” from the Latin amator, is especially dear to Dorsky: the word has also been used to dismiss his films. Annemarie Wadlow and Lucy Cordes Engelman take up Dorsky’s distinction between collecting the world as objects and making love to it: filmmaking not as possession, but as attention.

They arrive there through Dorsky’s Variations (1998), the New York Times critic Stephen Holden’s description of its plastic bag blown across a pavement, and the story of that image’s apparent migration into Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999). Stan Brakhage enters the conversation, alongside questions of theft, influence, embodiment and abstraction. What would it mean to encounter an image, a filmmaker or an archive without simply absorbing it into purposes already prepared for it?

Only four minutes long, Helga Dorothea Fannon’s Katherine May Fannon (2025) offers one answer through concentration. Over family photographs, Fannon’s father recalls several generations: one grandfather returned abusive after being gassed during the First World War; another, shell-shocked, would throw himself to the ground at the sound of a car exhaust. He remembers his mother’s cancer, which the family barely acknowledged. The photographs cannot disclose these histories by themselves. Hands move them; paper rustles; glass cubes refract faces; images appear through liquids and other surfaces.

“I will hear this when I need you the most,” reads its opening sentence. The archive is not only what remains after loss; it can be made in anticipation of it. The father’s recognisable Liverpool accent seems to reach us through a recording device, and at the end his voice cuts out mid-sentence. The film never needs to announce that memory is mediated or incomplete. It gives that condition material form. There is something Cavellian in its refusal to turn connection into possession. For Stanley Cavell, acknowledgment does not overcome our separateness from another person; it is a way of responding to that separateness without pretending to dissolve it. Fannon makes the relation tactile: closeness to these people and objects does not make them transparent. Its brevity is part of its confidence.

Dan Guthrie’s black strangers (2022) begins from almost the opposite condition. A research machine and old documents reveal an entry from 1719 recording the burial in Gloucestershire of “Daniel, a black stranger.” Guthrie addresses Daniel as his namesake and imagined companion. He wonders about Daniel’s shoe size, whether they might share a plantar fibroma, even whether the name was his. Finally the desire becomes explicit: “Daniel, right now I need you to be my mirror, my emotional doppelganger, my foot-lump twin.”

The question is compelling: how might one form a relation with somebody whom the archive has barely preserved as a person? Yet the film’s reflexivity repeatedly weakens its own wager. Despite the narration’s congenial, casual tone, Guthrie anticipates objections so insistently that what might gather emotional momentum is repeatedly second-guessed.

The problem is not that the relation is speculative; speculation may be all such an absence permits. The problem is that the film never generates the necessity of this particular speculation beyond Guthrie’s declaration that he needs Daniel as a mirror. By protecting the gesture against objection, the film also lowers the stakes that might have made it moving. More schematic yet paradoxically freer within its construction, Jay Rosenblatt’s Phantom Limb (2005) divides grief into twelve chapters. “Collapse” gives us demolished buildings, “Shock” laboratory rats receiving electric shocks, “Depression” images from the Great Depression. Some correspondences border on the literal. Yet through rhythm and music, the film commits to them with such force that the experience exceeds the neatness of the concept.

Home-movie footage shows Rosenblatt’s younger brother Eliot; intertitles recount his illness, death, and Rosenblatt’s guilt after teasing him. Then direct autobiography largely recedes. Grief disperses into images belonging to other histories: mourners, demolition, a dead bird, laboratory animals, anonymous people in crisis. Rosenblatt does not search these archives for his brother. He searches them for forms through which his brother’s absence can be felt.

Late in the film, an amputee describes continuing to feel pain in an arm that is no longer there. The metaphor is obvious, but the film has built enough emotional conviction not to be exhausted by it. What has disappeared remains active as an absence. In “Communication,” a man discusses mediums and possible contact with the dead. Cinema, too, is a medium: Eliot can look again toward a camera while nothing about his death is undone. The separateness acknowledged by Fannon’s film becomes absolute here. Cavell’s account of photography turns on the same contradiction: cinema makes a world available to sight while preserving our separation from it.

Seen beside Katherine May Fannon and Phantom Limb, Heavenly and Harrowing and black strangers reveal a shared difficulty. Both belong to a recognisably contemporary academic mode of filmmaking, in which qualification and self-questioning are treated as signs of openness. While reflexivity can deepen an encounter, here it repeatedly interrupts one. black strangers comments upon the danger of its own imaginative gesture until that gesture loses force. Heavenly and Harrowing scarcely lets a wager develop into commitment.

Wadlow and Engelman themselves describe their “many burners” bubbling away before being added to a “cauldron.” The metaphor diagnoses the method: artistic and theoretical references accumulate, but rarely meet enough resistance to develop. The recurring “maybe,” “I think,” “I don’t know,” and “that might just be personal” is more than conversational texture. Preserved in a finished film, it becomes a formal decision: every proposition arrives with an escape route. The result resembles a notebook whose sketches have bypassed the stages through which they might have been tested or transformed. Thought moves sideways.

The difference is not certainty against doubt. Katherine May Fannon is built around incomplete access; Phantom Limb openly displays the artificiality of its structure. What distinguishes them is conviction. They commit to their materials strongly enough to remain open to what those materials might produce. Fannon trusts a handful of fragments without explaining away their incompleteness. Rosenblatt imposes an almost crude structure and discovers an experience richer than it. By contrast, the demonstrative tentativeness of Heavenly and Harrowing and black strangers insulates their propositions from the consequences of making them.

This returns us to Dorsky’s amateur as lover rather than collector. Love and respect for an archive cannot mean approaching it so delicately that one refuses to act upon it: every selection, montage, recollection or speculation transforms what it touches. Nor does openness mean withholding commitment. It means committing strongly enough for an encounter to answer back—for an image, voice or vanished life to resist the meaning prepared for it and perhaps alter the form built around it. To acknowledge what survives is also to acknowledge what exceeds our possession of it. Love, respect, and openness begin in that resistance.