Venice "All Winter comes into my being" WINTER SONGS

Venice “All winter comes into my being”  WINTER SONGS

“Soon we shall plunge into the cold darkness;
Farewell, living brightness of our short-lived summers!

All winter comes into my being: wrath
Hate, horror, shivering, hard, forced labor,
And, like the sun in his polar Hades,
My heart will be a red and frozen block.

My spirit resembles the tower which crumbles
Under a heavy engine battered down.

It seems to me, lulled by these monotonous shocks,
That someone nails a coffin, but for whom?
Yesterday was summer; here is autumn
That mysterious noise sounds like a departure.

II

I love the greenish light of your long eyes,
Sweet beauty, but today all to me is bitter;
And nothing, not the boudoir nor the hearth
Today is worth as much as the sunlight on the sea.

O lover, sister, be the fleeting sweetness
Of a gorgeous autumn or of a setting sun.

Short task! The Tomb is waiting in its greed!
Kneeling before you let me taste and hold
While I lament the summer fierce and white
A ray of the late fall, mellow and gold.

Selected lines from Autumn Song, Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil

As the Autumn of 2025 drew in, I felt myself also drawn to making a short 16mm – I felt it should be a mainly handheld film in Venice.  I had a Bolex Paillard camera on loan from a friend.  I was thinking about poetry and recital and about trying songwriting.  How do songs come about?  I wondered if the film in Venice could be a in the style of a music video for these lyrics or songs.  Thus, the Songs of the title were written in a few hours as lyrics for eleven sung tracks in the lonely days of Christmas and December. However they felt better as spoken prose/poems so I recorded them as one spoken track, leaving it open as to whether to try them later as songs.  Being alone,  it was coming into winter and the “plunge into cold darkness” and I felt a strong need to escape London and to make a film in Venice as a woman alone perhaps a self portrait as I can be my own subject without the obligation to or need of a subject. Venice was the only city I wanted to go to, a small, intimate place where you can get lost,  full of history and art, full of the heaviness of luxury and ruin which has inspired countless fictions, novellas,  novels,  stories, mystery stories,  love stories, ghost stories and films. Poets, writers and filmmakers have sought out Venice as a sojourn and a subject, a backdrop and as a stage.  I felt driven by an abstruse desire.

Whilst there is a strong tradition in so-named lyrical experimental film where the filmmaker as artist often appears in their own films.  In the structural, non-figurative side of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op there was a practice of invisibility, a strict prohibition on appearing in your own work in order to be considered a serious filmmaker,  as there is  in the film industry and in independent film too.  The Director is behind the camera and the role is to control the means of visual power not to divest oneself of it by being in front of the camera.  To present oneself in front of the camera could imply two possible outcomes;  a wilful giving up some of this power to become a subject which could be in order to create a stronger power or it can considerably weaken the power of the director as an all seeing entity and responsible for the whole gaze of the film.   For  a woman director these are crucial and different positions  to what it might mean for a male director to take them up.   What are the implications for becoming the subject of the film – your own film –  and at the same time remain the object of the gaze and to enter oneself in the system of the gaze which is often (in certain kinds of films) at the centre of the film’s presence and power.  I want to control the gaze, and be in its system of cinema in my film and also part of its presence as cinema or perhaps film. If this leads to a power which can be placed in alignment with the direction of the work, it can lead to a strengthening but it can also lead to a weakening of the work if the  film does not mediate some distance.  Most women film directors who appear in their own film have been actresses and go in the opposite direction  later in their careers and as  film directors retreat behind the camera thus replacing the symbolic place they empty with a younger standing which fills the expected symbolic norm.  I break this rule in MARIA (2022) admittedly within classical experimental techniques and within the spectre of lyrical film,  I appear in the cemetery scenes in 16mm in experimental techniques of superimposition, negative and positive intercutting and solarisation in a series of self portraits and as a wandering figure in Père Lachaise.  Why did I want to enter the film, be part of it?  I entered through the cemetery gates as film portals perhaps as a ghostly figure or cypher.  Did I want to enter its structures of construction?    Whilst self inscription  through the drive is part of the trilogy of experimental films Stabat Mater (1990), “Now I am yours” (1992) and The Silence is Barque (1997) seeking jouissance through union and rupture, rapture and ecstasy, it is done through a disappearing camera.  In Venice, the camera is  present, on a tripod,  panning, shots, point of view,  handheld.   So this is different to my concept of self inscription and jouissance.  In Venice it has to do with walking, wandering and entering the constructed fictional space of the film.   When you enter your own domain in the  field of vision, do you dislocate the gaze?  Can you be both within the field of vision as a woman and outside of it as the controller of your own image?  By being a presence in your own film are you shifting the gaze,  making it appear ?  It was hidden according to world renown scholar Laura Mulvey whose ground breaking essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema first published in 1975,  discovered the construction of the gaze in the Hollywood cinema system as a system of looks and signs which revealed the concepts of woman’s  ‘to be looked-at-ness”.   Do I want the gaze,  am I creating a gaze by making myself the subject of it.  Am I empowering myself through the gaze?   The gaze can be that overall unlocatable construction which the film points to beyond the sum of the parts.  Can you you then control the gaze?  Can you dominate it?  How?  When you come out from behind the camera do you court the gaze and become its subject?

I was reading the poet Charles Baudelaire and his Flowers of Evil as a 19th century quintessential poetic sensory writing which seeks a luxurious, decadent and soporific atmosphere in some poems and invested in this luxury is the canker of decay which is at the heart of decadence.  I began to see decadence and escapism as a form of radical resistance which Bohemianism thought of also as resistance to societal norms and to duties to the social.   My  interest in escapism and such a work would seem to be a-sychronious with the logic of social obligation of much film production.  I saw it as a form of  resistance which offered the possibility of the creation of a radical space.

Whilst some of my films are associated with a religious register or reach,  the devil seems to be there as it is in Stabat Mater,  in “Now I am yours'” in MARIA it is in Callas’ force of daemonic utterance, in the profane darkness in Solitude and as a terrifying presence in Temenos.  In Venice the Devil is perhaps less disturbing, but one moment in the film testifies to an innate power on the Lido it is I feel the sublime moment of the film.  The Devil in my film is the fallen angel of light who is also a visitation in the as yet unreleased film The Far South. I meet a beautiful Luciferian form in Venice.  He comes to meet me at the Lido, he comes all the way from Milan, he is the 19th century devil of the Flowers of Evil,  of The Litanies of Satan, and of Le génie du mal and the removed classical attraction of L’Ange du mal.  He is also of course figures from film, poetry and rock.

I had the camera and I had enough stock  in the fridge to start.   First I needed an assistant preferably from and in Venice, an analogue aware photographic assistant who could also take location photographs and would help me map Venice as a place and decide on locations. Mattia Stefanutti took up the role of assistant camera and photographer and over the 3 day shoot as I introduced the 16mm camera he took up the role of cinematographer.  Two further visits consolidated this role in an exceptional creative experience of filming which also gave me the freedom to pursue direction.   A script was written after the first shoot as a dialogue between two lovers walking in Greenwich Park, they meet early in the morning and discuss, making a film in Venice, the absence of love, film as love, Beauty and the devil as a figure of beauty and poetry in the companion film “Venice “Sadness rises in me like the sea” WINTER LIGHT.

TRAILER

UK, June 2026
Duration: 20 minutes
Format: 16mm transferred to digital (4:3: 1 / 1:66:1 )
Sound: Stereo LT RT 24fps
Language: English (Italian subtitles)
Colour and Black and White

Credits
Written and Recited by Nina Danino
In the role of the Devil Pietro Fanelli
As Herself Nina Danino
Cinematography:  Mattia Stefanutti
Music: Dayclubbing composed by Dirt Brooks
Trailer:  Meeting Morrison, David Menke, The Devil Inside Me (OST) (2021)
Production: Temporal Films
Editing: Nina Danino
Fine Cut: Edd Maggs
Colour Grade: Jason R Moffat
Sound Mix: Stefan Smith
Graphic Design: Adrian Curry
Produced and Directed by Nina Danino

2026©Temporal Films

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TEMPORAL FILMS
temporalfilmsuk@gmail.com
M: +44 (0) 7775917674
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