In the Outskirts of Venice II – Dans les faubourgs de Venise II – Alla periferia di Venezia II
Rina Sherman
Cities & Elsewhere – Villes & Ailleurs : tableaux mouvants – Slow Cinema
HD, couleurs, 20 min, k éditeur, Paris, 2017
In this second moving tableau inspired by Venice, I delve into the lives of women in the city, weaving together the evocative verses of Poem No. 24 from Terze Rime (1575) by Veronica Franco—poet, humanitarian, and courtesan.
Venice, a city suspended on water, feels eternal yet bears the delicate imprint of fragility and impermanence. Each crossing of the Via della Libertà—the bridge tethering the centro storico to the mainland—evokes a profound melancholy. By night, entering this dreamlike world feels like stepping into a suspended reality, timeless yet quietly dissolving.
My first encounter with Venice, in 1989, led me deep into the Castello sestiere. I wandered through labyrinthine streets until I arrived at an unassuming terrace that resembled a private home more than a restaurant. There, the owner, who spoke no English, served me a simple yet unforgettable plate of pasta, lingering nearby with a silent curiosity. That intimate moment, preserved in memory like a cinematic still, remains a prism through which I see the city.
Venice is a place of perpetual motion, where the ebb and flow of water define its rhythm. The lagoon’s muted greens and the canals’ opaque turquoise create a living palette, shaping a world of sailors, ferrymen, and journeys—boats gliding between islands, water taxis slicing through mist, and vaporetti carrying the weight of centuries. Yet my connection to Venice resides not in these bustling waterways, but in its liminal spaces.
I am drawn to the edges—the outskirts and the islands—where time seems to pause. In these secluded corners, where silence meets slow decay, the architecture of memory unfolds. These floating landscapes, shaped by the erosion of history, appear as remnants of a choreography that is both eternal and in flux. The interplay of stillness and transformation resonates here, creating a visual and emotional language of transience.
Through the Cities & Elsewhere collection, I seek to distill this immediacy of time—to immerse myself in the ephemeral now, capturing the sensory depth of presence. This process of translation, blending image and poetry, is my attempt to preserve the fleeting essence of Venice as both a place and a state of being.
Cities & Elsewhere – Villes & Ailleurs : tableaux mouvants – Slow Cinema
In Cities and Elsewhere, a collection of moving tableaux, I draw inspiration from the traditions of Louis XIV’s tableaux vivants, Delsarte’s poses plastiques, and later performance practices, as well as from landscape painting and early landscape photography.
My work as a performance artist with Possession Arts in Johannesburg in the early 1980s also informs the static scenes filmed in Cities. Our tableaux vivants, such as Schreber’s Chicken and Rain, Steam and Speed, were staged performances inspired by the transformation of everyday scenes and durational performances, drawing from artists like Philip Glass, the Wooster Group, Elizabeth LeCompte, Spalding Gray, and Benjamin Patterson.
In the first two pieces of Cities, the images present everyday landscapes with little or no movement and minimal sound: a door closing, the cry of a passing seagull, footsteps fading away… Over time, the interplay between film, painting, and photography shifts the reference from everyday reality to other dimensions of existence. These tableaux vivants emerge from this transformation, creating a living narration of the static landscape through a real-time choreographed gesture.
In this collection, Rina Sherman explores her deep connection to landscapes through a series of urban and rural cine-poems. As in Heraclitus’s river, where the water never flows the same way twice, the movement of these landscapes extends infinitely (2017).
Crédit photo couverture : Rina Sherman / ADAGP
collection – Cities & Elsewhere – Villes & Ailleurs : tableaux mouvants – Slow Cinema
duration – 20 min
genre – documentary, poetic, experimental / format 1 hour
classification – G – general public, specialised, Venice, Venise, Venezia, Italy, Lagoon, masks, canals, bridges
year – 2017
language – English
country – France
format – 1920×1080, 25fps, 1.66:1, sound mono / stereo
VOVA – English voice
contact sales– distribution – public screenings
values: document, history, portrait, educational, research, music, opéra
hashtag : #kediteur #Venice #slowcinema #opera #cities #elsewhere #Venezia #Italy #rinasherman #tableaumouvant
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