Dani Leventhal at the Gene Siskel Film Center

The program notes drew me in for Dani Leventhal’s Draft 9 (2003), Show and Tell in the Land of Milk and Honey (2007), 9 Minutes of Kaunaus (2007), Picnic (2006), and 3 Parts for Today (2007), presented as part of the series Conversations at the Edge. Reports of various random images under the description “astonishing video diaries” prepared me for the possibilities ahead. I took my seat, waiting to see how “skinned animals” and “romantic liaisons” would play out .
Camera shaking, sound cracking, Leventhal interacting from behind the camera, the video was eerily similar to old family home videos. The content quickly revealed itself to break well beyond traditionally comfortable family boundaries. There is an intimacy felt so deeply by the viewer as Leventhal captures the raw, human emotion gifted by her family and friends, all well aware of the camera, yet treating it as an extension of Dani, their daughter, their grandchild, their lover. Moments of awareness of being filmed drift in occasionally, but remain honest in their own right. Leventhal asks her grandfather for his picture. He senses her concentration through the viewfinder as she captures his tattoo that tells the tale of his survival. We feel her shifting discomfort as he calls her out on her transparent cover of just wanting a picture.
Animals loving, breeding, injured and in death, spliced with intimate portraits of Leventhal’s closest relationships, remind us of our own fragility in body and mind. Leventhal methodically skins the dead, ripping and pulling and tearing with dirty fingers. We sense the resistance of the thick coat of the heavy deer carcass, and know the amount of pressure it takes to pop out an eyeball from its socket. We think of our own. We watch as a broken bird gasps for breath, dying all alone, and we think of our own. We peer through the reeds as swans perform their sacred mating dance, copulate, then separate. We reflect upon these animals, this family, Dani, and ponder on what it is to be human, through happiness and suffering, in pain and in death.
Leventhal stated that in contrary to the description in the program notes, she does not consider her shorts to be video diaries. If they were diaries, they would be private, for her alone . I dare to ask, what more could be hidden when seemingly all had been revealed?