Synopsis
The story of two characters we hear but never see. Like an old manuscript tucked away at the back of a drawer, the film begins as a young student films the markets of London in 1969. Twenty-five years later, she invites a man to watch the film that captures her youth. The couple engages in a dialogue about the images of that era, and a budding love emerges as the film comes to an end. Much like a Russian doll, the film possesses multiple layers: the woman narrating her past, the couple providing commentary on the images, and the film itself.
A word from Tënk
With selections at the Rotterdam Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival, Markets of London is one of Mireille Dansereau's films that has gained significant international recognition. In the mid-1990s, Dansereau's career took a turn when she began working on reusing and exploring her own old or unfinished material. Markets of London is a reassembly of footage shot while the filmmaker was an MA student at the Royal College of Art in London in 1969. Engaging with passersby running errands, fishmongers, merchants, as well as regulars frequenting cafes near the stalls, the footage captures—with a hint of "candid eye"—emergences and applied skills amid the crowd stocking up. Off-screen voices, including fictional voices (those of Louise Marleau [who plays the editor] and Claude Gauthier), comment on the images, questioning them in a suspended moment of time. A kind of seduction and a call to memory take then place.
Rachel Samson
Animator, author and programmer
