EN CAYSS UV ROMANSS
Though I wasn’t conscious of this linkage when curating our Winter 2026 issue, on subsequent review I realized all three films incorporate split screens. Though the video essays and cinepoems in this issue are tonally and formally different from one another, there is a preoccupation with doubling throughout each one– sometimes for a mirroring effect, but also to create a dialectic between the two moving images that generates a new idea or visual polyphony. I love thinking of each of these works as pieces that invite you through the looking glass: of commerce, time, or desire. These films will haptically, intellectually, and emotionally touch you, as well as open up new ways of seeing with kaleidoscopic brilliance and formal prowess.
In Johanna Winters’s EN CAYSS UV ROMANSS (2022), a puppet-protagonist waits in a hotel room, presumably for a romantic rendezvous. With a split screen showing her in various states of repose and invented phonetics as subtitles, EN CAYSS UV ROMANSS is at once oneiric and also deeply quotidian as it illuminates themes of aging, longing, and desire. Winters’s paper maché costuming amplifies sags, wrinkles, and folds, not as attributes to be derided, but as parts of a body worth close and careful attention. Through a series of close-ups on the sculpted face and the sculpted hands pulling on laced underwear, Winters’s camera embodies both a first-person point-of-view as well as a third-person point-of-view, allowing for both distance from, and intimacy with, her film’s subject, as we inhabit the protagonist’s interiority, preoccupations, and desires.
