ela kazdal

Ela is an artist and filmmaker based in London and a video editor at MUBI. She has presented her films at Salt Beyoğlu in Istanbul (TR), Æden in Berlin (DE), Everyman Cinema, Firstsite, Fabrica, Royal College of Art (UK) The Film-maker’s Cooperative in New York (US) and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL).  
















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On the Intimate Technics of Film with Ela Kazdal 
by Ester Freider

For her first artist portrait, artist and filmmaker Ela Kazdal had photos taken in the Steenbeck room of Central Saint Martins. This small, cramped room is one of her favorite places in the world.  The flat bed editor it contains reminds one rather of a complicated sewing machine or an engorged, wiry stovetop. In this room, words like “cut” and “splice”, rather than being pictographic shortcuts on Premiere Pro, are physical procedures that must be carried out with crafty and domestic hands. Ironically enough, Kazdal almost never actually uses a camera.

For her film “thread, chain, beads, and tacks” (2025), Kazdal played with the filmstrip like a fidget toy. Painted, screenprinted, cut, stickered, and rayographed with thread, fabric, and metal tools, the filmstrip becomes itself a plastic doll to dress and undress in material. Inspired by Dadaist Man Ray’s classic short film “Le Retour à la raison”, that similarly featured silhouettes of screws and bolts, and by Annabel Nicolson’s performance “Reel Time” (1971), in which the artist ran film through a sewing machine as it was simultaneously being projected. Kazdal’s film updates the tactile film genre with today’s techniques, pairing it with an exhilarating soundscape that rings of absorbent discovery. In 1926, Fernand Leger published “A New Realism – The Object”, which advocated the use of film in order to emphasize the graphic and plastic value of simple objects such as “a pipe—a chair—a hand—an eye—a typewriter—a hat—a foot, etc., etc” (p. 96). He claimed that finding beauty in such quiet tools was never possible before the use of the camera, with light as its prime decorator, as a deliberate and controllable eye. Artists like Ray, Nicolson, and Kazdal go beyond Leger’s wish to beautify the everyday tool. In “threads, chain, beads, and tacks” patterns of thread and tools are indeed turned into loving layouts to witness as they whirr past the screen on the film reel. So does another smaller filmstrip, carrying with it vignettes of caterpillars and the sea. Its sprocket holes glide along within the bigger film strip, a mother caught in child’s web. Within this meta-moment the filmstrip itself is love-objected in its own dress-up. As it is adorned, sectioned off, and ultimately tampered with, the filmstrip’s plasticity is rendered apparent, but so is its vulnerability. Ironically, the dress-up game has rendered it naked. A naked eye with its own scopes and limits.  

Ela writes that she wants to display the original film strips alongside the projection of “threads, chain, beads, and tacks”: “I feel that the audience should know the origin of the film they are seeing, to come back to film as a three-dimensional experience. From the screen, the two-dimensional world, into their hands.” What a gory candaulism it is to unwind the acetate from its natural perfect (re)coil into a secretless index, to unfurl and steal away its magic, to put it on display after your diction of its use. A century ago, in the Années folles of Paris, artist Man Ray would dress up his artist and muse Kiki de Montparnasse – the woman whose torso was filmed in “Le Retour à la raison” alongside salt, pepper, pins, and tacks – according to his mood before going to parties with her. He “meticulously applied her cosmetics and assisted in the choice of her clothes, creating a visual style that is as much a part of his oeuvre as any of his signed paintings" (Klein, 2009, p. 144). Ray saw Kiki’s body, the tool through which much of his work was produced, as his work itself. This was a love without secrets, without a refuge in the un-image-able sacred. Such is Kazdal’s love for the materiality of film: no magic tricks. 

Ela says to me that she really wants a Bolex, the gold standard camera for motion picture production on film, to also lay deconstructed in the middle of the exhibition. She has always been curious about what's inside. An already delicate machine, it would be helpless. Disemboweled, its function would turn to sweet, clean fetish. If Kazdal were one to use cameras, peering inside makes one the artist’s cuckold: privy completely to the materials of her process but not its sensations. However, she isn’t. This camera is more like a virginal ghost of what’s been left behind due to her plastic tactics. But the fetishistic leanings remain, and are particularly resonant at a time in which our most instinctual technics – digital ones – seem to lack texture. As Malcolm LeGrice notes in his 1999 essay “Digital Cinema and Experimental Film”, digital media cannot be defined as a single medium with its own characteristics, unlike all art forms that have come before it. He writes that digital systems take multimedia to its natural extreme by adding to it “the fundamental non-tactility or non-visibility of its electronic data and processes”. While I wouldn’t call Ela nostalgic or atemporal – as her work indeed revels in the application of new technology such as UV printing, screenprinting, and vinyl on film – her fixation on filmmaking material as a love-object does reveal, perhaps, a desire for renewed reflexivity, or at the very least, transparency, within the art-making process in the face of the indescribable flatness we are smothered with in digital creation tools like Adobe Suite and the social media we transmit it to. Le Grice wrote, even longer ago, that the modernist tenet that “there can be no convenient separation between the material ‘means’ of a work and its meaning – that meanings derive from the working of the material” (qtd. In Small, 2003) is often underrepresented in mainstream film, as opposed to the plastic arts. Ela’s approach reapplies this oft-worn but never-tired tenet into film in a way that Edward S. Small would call “technostructural” (2003); her technical choices affect, or rather create, the film’s structure of sensations. The bolts, thread, and marker patterns act as a fast-lathering Rorschach through which the viewer cannot narrativize but only sense and feel. 

In 1521, late Renaissance artist Parmigianino made a self-portrait using a barber’s convex mirror. His delicate features are foregrounded by a concealing left hand which covers the other one hard at work with the brush. Instead of depending entirely on his own capacity for illusion, Parmigianino chose to paint this piece on a specially designed wooden panel whose curve and round shape mimicked the original mirror. This choice, just like the incident of Kazdal’s filmstrip, rendered the canvas naked, to be dressed up by the pigment and linseed that usually lay flat and lustrous on a neutral panel. Postmodernist poet John Ashbery lamented this Mannerist breakage with magic in his acclaimed poem named after the picture, “Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror” (1974):

“The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts, 
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.”

Parmigianino was one of the first to lift out the innards and gaze at them with love rather than disgust. A canvas is not a window to elsewhere, a canvas is just a canvas. A strip of film is not magic, it is material and light. He thought we were better off knowing. In Annabel Nicolson’s 1971 performance with projected film run through a sewing machine, the collusion of production and showcase was a planned obsolescence on the artist’s part. The piece had to stop each time the film broke from the sewn punctures, needing new splices over and over, until it was completely unviable. As Lux recorded, “The performance ends with the film's destruction, when the projectionist announces that it can no longer pass through the projector. The house-lights come on” (Sparrow, N/D). Artists that gaze at the innards are daredevils. They, perhaps selfishly, want to see how close they can get their process to the product before it all detonates and deep fries, either conceptually or literally. Kazdal’s desire to prize her tool above all else is one such dangerous decision. A love-letter to the filmic medium, made at all costs. No concealed carry. No hero’s journey. You can’t imagine this love. You can only hold it in your hands.


works cited
Ashbery, J. (1974) ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, Poetry, 124(5). 
Klein, M. (2009) Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention. New Haven: Yale University Press. 
Leger, F. (1960 (1926)) ‘A New Realism – The Object’ in Introduction to the Art of the Movies: An Anthology of Ideas on the Nature of Movie Art, ed. Lewis Jacobs. New York: Noonday Press.
Le Grice, M. (1999) ‘Digital Cinema and Experimental Film - Continuities and Discontinuities.’ Available at: https://luxonline.org.uk/articles/digital_cinema(1).html.  
Small, E. S. (2003) ‘Beyond Abstract Film: Malcolm Le Grice's Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age’, Film-Philosophy, 7(7). 
Sparrow, F. (N/D) ‘Annabel Nicolson: The Art of Light and Shadow.’ Lux. Available at: https://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/annabel_nicolson/essay(1).html. 
Wisse, J. (2025) ‘‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’: Parmigianino’s Brilliantly Warped Perspective.’ The Wall Street Journal, 24 January. Available at: https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/fine-art/self-portrait-in-a-convex-mirror-parmigianinos-brilliantly-warped-perspective-293408b3?mod=arts-culture_lead_pos2.