Meredith Monk’s films and stage pieces contain visions of the past, particularly visions of her own Jewish heritage, which she uses to make sense of the present. Her early films Quarry (1975) and Ellis Island (1979) are silent, poetic meditations, using spare, black and white images, almost devoid of movement, to convey visions that are both thoughtful and urgent. In Book of Days (1988), her new film (released in two versions, one for theaters and a slightly shorter one for television), she tries to take the concerns and techniques of the earlier films and expand them into a full-length narrative with color and sync-sound. Her techniques do not make the leap into the feature-film format, and the formal devices she adopts do not convey her visions quite as powerfully as the ones she used in her earlier films.
Each of the three films seems to have been inspired by her reaction to a particular site. Quarry is set in an abandoned rock quarry partially filled with water. One scene shows an enormous wall of cut rock, empty, hot, and dry looking. One tiny figure emerges from behind a boulder, then another, until we see that what we thought was an empty quarry is in fact filled with a large crowd of people, who subsequently disappear again. I can easily imagine Monk coming upon the place by chance and thinking, “what a neat place to make a movie! There could be a group of people hidden behind those rocks and you’d never know they were there until they popped out…” The site’s odd, abandoned, and isolated feeling seems to have suggested the film’s other evocative images, such as the grids of still people floating in the water holding on to logs. The rocks feel hot and dry, while the pools are wet, cool and murky. The image gives the feeling of uncovering hidden feelings and characters. When I saw the film in its original context, as part of the stage piece about the Holocaust, also called Quarry, it reminded me of all the bodies piled up in American Jewish memories. Ellis Island, too, seems to have sprung from Monk’s response to a unique site. The immigration center, before its recent renovation, had been abandoned since 1954. Its crumbling offices, docks, etc., easily evoked the ghosts of immigrants and officials, and it was also a visually spectacular location for a movie.