Experiencing Cinema
Rosângela Rennó
2004-5
Rennó modernizes the use of a magic lantern, and specifically phantasmagoria, by projecting images collected from her family and from flea markets onto a curtain of smoke. The original magic lantern uses still images to create an illusion of movement- Rennó uses a similar philosophy, but instead of creating moving images in the animated sense, she gives her images a sense of ephemera and ghost like movement to add to her concept. Rennó uses collected and found black and white photographs to draw connections between different topics such as love, war, family, and crime, and uses smoke to emphasize the forgetting of time and the anonymity of subjects without context. I like this work for its ghostly and off putting nature. I find that the noise that the smoke machine creates keeps me on edge and adds to the “creepy” nature of the photographs. What I would do to improve the quality of this work would be to create a deeper narrative for the photographs giving them a more intense concept and personal touch.