Jennifer Montgomery has been making what many suppose "personal films" for the last decade.

Jennifer Montgomery has been making what many suppose "personal films" for the last decade. Her first 16mm feature-length work, Art for Teachers of Children (1995) played widely in the United States and abroad. A fictionalized autobiographical film, it explores an affair between a female prep gymnasium student and the male institute counselor who takes nude photographs of her. Montgomery's other work includes short super-8 films of that kind as Home Avenue (1989), Age 12: be fond of with a Little L (1990) and I, A Lamb (1992) as well as the video author of poems in the Ring (1992). Her chiefly recent film, Troika (1998), premiered at the strange Festival of Lesbian and Gay Film in recent York City last June, and has since played at like venues as New York City's Museum of present Art, San Francisco Cinemateque, looks Angeles Film Forum, Pasadena Art Center Squeaky Wheel in Buffalo, the Milwaukee Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and various communitys and universities.

A film about sex and power, Troika is compos of couple narratives woven together. One is an adaptation - or, rather, a reenactment - of an interview from journalist Jennifer Gould with right-wing Russian demagogue Vladimir Zhirinovsky that was mannersed in August 1994 and published in Playboy in March 1995 The interview takes place onward a boat traveling down the Volga River (Montgomery actually marksman the reenactment in Connecticut) during Zhirinovsky's campaign for President. A young woman, Masha, translates the conversation between Gould and Zhirinovsky; the dialogue therefore takes place in the one and the other English and Russian, with any subtitles for the conversation not translated aloud. Initially they discuss politics, further Zhirinovsky steers the conversation into seedier waters, at the same point suggesting that the women have sex with his henchmen while he watches. The other narrative is a story of brace women, Jennifer and Z, who are in the proces of dissolving their relationship. Things begin going downhill as they prepare to go on to Russia and continue to fizzle as they are traveling. The same actress plays Jennifer in one as well as the other stories, but while she essentially reads the words of Gould in the interview views in the other narrative she is a fictional character.

These separate narratives are conjoined in a number of ways. Jennifer and the translator appear in the pair story spaces. Visual details also appear across the sum of two units narratives. The film cuts between shows of the interview itself and of contentious discussions between Jennifer and Z Words from the actual interview are nuncupative not only in the reenactments of the interview itself still also by characters in the parallel story. In this way, the film's form translates dynamics of textual and political power between the sum of two units scenes.

As with theater and film, the relationship between literature and film has been united of the most fundamental ways cinema has been understood as a kind of multi-media art, or at least an art form that is indebted to other, written forms. The link is, of course, inevitable, considering the etymological and historical origins of "cinematography": writing in motion. This connection has further been divideed and reconfigured in order to emphasize the distinct qualities of cinematic verse s Such connections and reconfigurations have been detailed by the agency of classical film theorists like Hugo Munsterberg, Sergei Eisenstein and Andre Bazin; from early arbiters of "auteur theory," especially Alexandre Astruc; according to narratologists and theorists of adaptation; and through those who themselves adapt the language of literary forms to describe the "language" of film and video.

A seeming get back to the Lumieres' inscription of the name "cinematographe," Astruc's metaphor of the "camera-stylo" (the camera-pen) perhaps best shows the fluidity between media forms (and instruments). As he writes, "This metaphor has a real precise sense. By it I mean that the cinema will gradually break delivered from the tyranny of what is visual, from the image for its be in possession of sake, from the immediate and agglomerated demands of the narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and artful as written language."(1) Michael Renov concretizes this metaphor in a series of written works in which he examines the "essayistic" in visual subjects In "History And/As Autobiography: The Essayistic in Film & Video," he argues that the essay is essentially a "heterotopic" form and thus expects at films and videos that share this quality.(2) He maintains, "These visual works, like the literary essay form, can be said to resist generic classification, straddling a series of all-too-confining antinomies: fiction/non-fiction, documentary/avant-garde, cinema/video."(3) In connecting these antinomies, Renov could same well be assessing Montgomery's work, which would arguably fall into the (anti)tradition of the clauses that he is discussing. While it is, perhaps, also redundant to claim that a film, already adapted from a written interview, is "essayistic" in form, labeling it as so emphasizes the mobility between written and cinematic media that the film exercises.