I have a decade of experience editing documentary, commercial and branded content. Clients include Condé Nast, Refinery29, Genius, Bustle, and TAG Creative. In 2019 I completed the edit of feature-length documentary Universe.
Currently playing: Ilana Glazer for Ladygunn; directed by Julia Pitch, edited by Sara Sowell
Dada’s Daughter is an ongoing expanded-cinema performance with 16mm film projections and a live score using objects of illusionary optics and industrial scrap. Abstractions of light and pattern reintroduce photographic practices of early 20th century Dada films by way of darkroom techniques and improvisation. Spliced in between photograms and negative images, sections of clear film leader cue a live performance activating the remote objects photographed on celluloid through the immediacy of the film projector’s beam. When placed in front of the projector these objects create tactile optical images; impressions of form, shape and pattern that reenact the process of capturing images on celluloid.
“Sowell’s critique of capitalism is not necessarily a Marxist one, but it is a material one. The choice to shoot the Kardashians on 16 mm film is an argument for the artistry of hand-processed film over the immediacy of digital technologies, and 16 mm film historically evokes avant-garde or oppositional film histories that are often anti-narrative. Whereas narrative storytelling assumes a future—an ongoingness after the three-act structure concludes on-screen—anti-narrative and structural film makes space for the possibility that there is no future, further evidenced by Sowell’s decision to project negatives, which deteriorate with each subsequent screening. The film is not archival: it has a life to expend.”
