Unfolding the Aryan Papers

UK, 2009. Directors Jane and Louise Wilson.

Artists Jane and Louise Wilson made this film following a residency in the Stanley Kubrick Archive, where they discovered extensive archival materials relating to the director’s unrealised film about the Holocaust, The Aryan Papers. The Wilsons’ focus is on the Dutch actress Johanna ter Steege whom Kubrick cast in the early-1990s in the lead role as a beautiful Polish-Jewish woman – a role that was to propel her into international stardom. For their film the artists asked ter Steege to re-enact parts of the script as well as short temporal fragments based on photographs, capturing what they call her ‘process of becoming’. And it is above all ter Steege’s original wardrobe shots that emerge as the vital ingredient here, tangible and visually compelling evidence of the actress inhabiting her role. Using the metaphor of unfolding, the film is a melancholy and perhaps even cathartic excavation of time gone by, which itself points to another, unspeakably painful moment in history.

With Johanna ter Steege.

Past screenings

Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream – London
Saturday 11 March 2017, 18:30 | The Horse Hospital
Screened alongside Irma Vep: The Last Breath (2014) and Rose Hobart (1936), with introduction by Tom Gunning.