Let me count the ways: Minus 10, Minus 9, Minus 8, and Minus 7

Let me count the ways: Minus 10, Minus 9, Minus 8, and Minus 7

2004, USA, mini-DV, colour, sound, 20 min.

Let Me Count the Ways is an ongoing serial about violent terror and its aftermath. In episodes Minus 10, 9, 8, and 7, personal reminiscence is mixed with archive and new footage in an exploration of the interior of fear. From footage of the artist's father on the way to Hiroshima, through references to 9/11, the phenomenology of horror and the echo of its rupture are presented with an intensity that moves the viewer from history to the present and beyond.
I want to spark the imagination into sensing something of a past, while at the same time giving a place for the images to have a full, awesome present. Not to privilege the past, but to experience wonder that it exists, like looking at stars.

Leslie Thornton

The films of Leslie Thornton have helped to define the very nature of contemporary avant-garde practice. Her work has been consistently in the forefront of that tendency which takes a theoretical and critical analysis of the cinematic image as a central concern, while conducting a painstakingly detailed interrogation of the texture of a highly-mediated everyday life. Thornton's films directly engage with issues in feminism, colonialist/post-colonialist studies, semiotic theory and cultural analysis. They demonstrate a rich and provocative attention to relations between sound and image and the syntactical potential of the film form. Experimenting with multi-media, specifically the relation between film, video, theatre, and still photography, Thornton explores the limits of representation and the myriad discursive relations of spectators to images.

Mary Ann Doane
A Brief Overview of The Work of Leslie Thornton in Senses of Cinema, 2002