Guest
Those who have seen In the City of Sylvia know that few filmmakers today can work their camera through public spaces with as much live-wire energy as Guerin. Here, the space is both public and deeply personal: the street outside his apartment window, where a musician neighbor fell to his death from the opposite building. Guerin opens with archival video he had taken of the man practicing violin at his window. It was a sound that connected everyone on the block, as Guerin proves through interviews with dozens of neighbors that ring with warmth and intimacy, even in sorrowful reflection. Guerin weaves their testimonials – heartbroken, perplexed, and somewhat fatalistic – with shots of the spot where the violinist’s body landed, returning again and again to the stark mark of absence in his community. He ultimately ends up in the man’s apartment, where traces of his depressed life remain – a volume of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, sketches, a lonely, half-finished wine glass. But these phantom artifacts are cast in an afternoon glow of otherworldly beauty, as if light itself were the last word in the sum effects of our lives. Guerin’s camera is unabashedly romantic, and with it he tries to fathom a darker, deadlier strain of the same yearning impulse. He may not get to the bottom of his neighbor’s fatal mystery, but his attempt is a gesture of near-perfect grace.
