Aftersong
2023 · 10m · United Kingdom
Directed by Matthew Berka
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A 16mm meditation on two artists who made their final works while dying of tuberculosis: nature writer Richard Jefferies and composer Lili Boulanger.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a reverential essay film about dead artists making deathbed masterworks—exactly the kind of prestige-adjacent material that gets programmed into every 'contemplative shorts' block without breaking a sweat. Berka's doing the most conservative thing possible with a genuinely unsettling premise.
Berka positions *Aftersong* in direct conversation with the essay film tradition—Marker, Farocki, the lineage of 16mm meditation—while treating his dual subjects (Jefferies and Boulanger) as formal precedents rather than biographical subjects, which is a curatorial choice that transforms the entire work into an argument about artistic legacy and the frame itself.
The decision to interweave two artists across different centuries and mediums (prose, composition) on the same dying trajectory could feel gimmicky, but whatever editorial choice Berka made—the pacing, the breath between images—holds that duality steady without collapsing into metaphor, which is the whole ballgame here.