FILM ELEGY by Laura Paul

The handmade first edition of Film Elegy is now sold out. This second edition—commercially printed and perfect bound—is available in perpetuity via this listing or directly from Lulu.

ISBN 9798991148931. 124 pages. 8.5" x 11".

Is there anything living ever?

Amything       you were

one second of film

one sprocket on the strip

not an encore | a show

a whole production .

Laura Paul's Film Elegy is a document of personal loss and the decline of celluloid. Modified from 16mm and formatted to fit the page, Paul’s book asks to be viewed as much as read. Punctuation evokes flickering light, sprocket holes, and cutaway shots, layering photochemical processes as rhapsodic undertones.

“I burn bright | for you,” Paul writes, “for our love of images and silver | so combustible.”

Framed by Paul’s friendship and apprenticeship with the late filmmaker Amy Halpern (1953–2022), the book speaks to the communities and legacies of screen culture. It honors the encounters between spectators and films as well as the attachments formed between them—what Godard calls “the relation with me looking at it dreaming up a relation.”

As our dreams of the screen flicker, Film Elegy projects words in silver gelatin.

Laura Paul is a writer and artist published in The Brooklyn Rail, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, Pangyrus, minor literature[s], Dream Pop Journal, and other outlets. Her work has been exhibited at the Armory Center for the Arts, Other Places Art Fair, L.A. Zine Fest, West Hollywood Book Fair, and included at the Omnidawn Poetry Conference, the Community of Writers Poetry Program, and the New Orleans Poetry Festival. She earned her B.A. in Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington, where she was named a Mary Gates Scholar in the Arts and Humanities, and her Master's Degree in Cinema and Media Studies from UCLA, where she received the 2011 Gilbert Cates Fellowship for Artistic and Academic Merit. In 2019, she was a finalist in the Black Warrior Review Flash Contest, and in 2022, her piece "I Became Dead" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. To find out more, visit LauraPaulWriter.com.

Amy Halpern (1953-2022) directed almost forty short films, as well as the experimental feature Falling Lessons. She worked as a cinematographer and gaffer on Tremors, Stand and Deliver, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, The Decay of Fiction, Breaking the Maya Code, My Brother's Wedding, and many others. She began studying filmmaking at SUNY Binghamton with Ken Jacobs and Larry Gottheim and went on to earn her MFA in Film Production from UCLA. In the 1970s, she co-founded the New York Collective for Living Cinema, the Los Angeles Independent Film Oasis, and collaborated with the New York Apparition Theater. She taught at many universities throughout her career, including Otis College of Art and Design and USC. To find out more about her work, visit: AmyHalpern.com.