Self Portrait with a Line from Lorca
2023 · 5m · Isle of Man
Directed by Janet Lees
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, provocative
An ekphrastic poetry film tracing a chain from Ana Segovia's bullfighting-revision painting through a poem to moving image, against machismo and animal cruelty.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A five-minute essay film about a painting about bullfighting sounds like exactly the kind of nested, self-aware formalism that makes most people's eyes glaze over — which is precisely why Lees's refusal to simplify the chain (painting → poem → image) into something digestible is genuinely radical.
The ekphrastic tradition runs deep, from Auden to Simic, and Lees positions herself deliberately within it while interrogating how poetry and visual art translate into cinema; the film's formal restraint and attention to the specific genealogy of her sources marks real curatorial intelligence.
The decision to *not* flatten the three-way conversation between Segovia's painted revision of bullfighting, Lorca's language, and Lees's own image-making — keeping all three voices in tension rather than resolving them — is the kind of structural choice that makes a shoestring budget feel like conceptual necessity.