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‘Turn in the Wound’ Review: Abel Ferrara Interweaves Poetry and War in Mostly Successful Digital Doc
Partnering with Patti Smith for 'Turn in the Wound,' Abel Ferrara delivers an aesthetically challenging lament on documenting modern horrors.
The project’s chronicling of recent history ends up elevated by Ferrara — who enlists longtime collaborators Sean Price Williams (“The Sweet East”) and Emmanuel Gras (“Makala”) to serve as camera operators — from mere reflection on violent events to digital self-reflection on the way their images transform viewers through sight and sound. These take the form of painful, protracted firsthand recollections of bloodshed and desolation, from stories of buildings destroyed by artillery shells, to accounts of mothers and grandmothers forced to step up from behind the confines of femininity and social expectation. The artifice is exposed early on, as these interviews, filmed against backdrops of rubble, are briefly interrupted by shots of the filmmaker and his crew, a small group of witnesses standing in a war zone with little more than a flimsy microphone and tiny cameras (including a cell phone at one point).
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