Invention

Mature films are able to work with ellipses, and Courtney Stephens’ Invention not only makes of narrative ellipses the motor of our film perception and the occasion for our active comprehension, but inserts its narration into the considerable ellipsis that is the loss of a father whose biography has disappeared from the daughter’s sight. The paternal legacy is a personal theme that we have the time to meditate on, as universal theme or, more specifically, as an intergenerational one.

The physical grain of Super 16mm film finds an ally in the VHS aesthetics conveyed by the archive footage of a father completely absorbed in the marketing TV machine of the Eighties and the Nineties. Certainly for the viewers sharing memories of these times, the film provides a stimulating confrontation with the by-products of an entire epoch, from a certain dull optimism to a particular object fetishism – where the American dream seemed to sink into a peculiar American kitsch and/or American conspiracy paranoia.

Carrie’s (the daughter, the main character, who is Callie Hernandez, co-writer of Invention) distant and slightly reproaching gaze however is only the starting point of the filmic journey. Initially, Carrie is the vehicle of an emancipatory criticism towards a consumerist culture where values are systematically commodified and communication inevitably turned into marketing – a culture that seems to be perfectly embodied by her father childishly playing with science and ending up selling para-scientific healing devices. The harsh judgment that her gaze expresses though is destined to slowly develop while she gets closer to her father’s world, less and less reluctantly, thereby drawing a hesitant appropriation of both his material inheritance and spiritual legacy. Invention tells the story of the cracks in her secular and rationalist convictions, without falling into a full conversion or a proper rehabilitation of the father (and what he represents).

On this path of growing complexity, the quite simple storytelling makes a couple of “stops” with characters that allow her – and us – to experience those cracks. More than the figures directly bound to her father’s cosmos, and equally bound to several forms of belief, are two “neutral” figures out of his world, who cannot avoid immediately arising complicity with her, the ones that render those cracks quite visible. The young notary – what a surprise to see wonderful artist James N. Kienitz Wilkins impersonating him! – delivers the cautious and rational voice of law, whose rocky truth sounds both professional and artificial – exactly like the true and fictional product of art… The cool anti-bourgeois bohemian (film director Sahm McGlynn), actually a super-bourgeois, delivers the sarcastic irony of a know-it-all, in a way beyond the divide of rationalist science and dubious beliefs. Carrie’s love affair with the aforementioned bohemian represents the last resistance against her accepting her father’s cosmos as legitimate, or at least worthy of consideration. When she breaks up with him, she can finally navigate liberated from any solid conviction, free to fly beyond what irony would necessarily reduce.

“Take it seriously” – and not “take it easy” – seems to be the motto of Carrie’s unusual liberation, a seriousness that makes her lighter in turn, less cool, less distant, more committed, more passionate. This is the seriousness of human belief beyond science, the seriousness of visionary inventions without evidence, the seriousness that has her if not embracing then at least reconnecting to and understanding her father, and her father’s legacy. Would we be able, in this way, to reconnect and reconsider an entire epoch of more or less innocent imposture? Probably not. Invention does not lead us to any kind of rehabilitation, but rather to an exercise of comprehension, or the acknowledgment of fragility in strength, and strength in fragility. These ellipses won’t never be saturated.