Alaska is large and cold and slightly crazy. The film Alaska by Dore O. is small and cold and also slightly crazy. Dore O. is a German artist and an experimental film maker. Alaska is from 1968. It is a wordless film with a simple, droning soundtrack that sounds as if it is a piece for violin and refrigerator hum. (Possibly the hum is the result of age.) It may be about Alaska. It may be about the north. It may be about swimming in cold water.

It cuts between images of water, images of stippled walls, and images of a beach. And people on the beach. And all the people are out of focus or cut in two.

I think it’s about our memories of the bodies of others.

An ill-framed shot or a hooded camera? A family photo taken at the very end of the roll, perhaps. That shot we intend to toss away because we aren’t sure if its going to come out or not. If it will survive the photo processing center.

If we rely on our suspect memories, we really only get a section of the picture anyway.

The water rolling in is superimposed with a shot of a woman—half in and half out—floating. Her body is cut in half not by camera frame, but by the effect. The water’s superimposition. More color, more detail, it asks for more of the camera’s, and the viewer’s attention. The body is half out-to-sea. Half lost-at-sea.

Then there are the bodies out of focus. The camera sits on the beach, it’s focus fixed. The bodies approach from far away. They slowly gather into recognizable shapes—from a darkening spot to a pillar to a column with shifting colors at its base to a fuzzy biped. And they run through the focus, never allowing the camera more than a fleeting in-focus shot, or the viewer a chance to process and judge. The body fades in. The body fades out. Arms and legs may as well be smoke, and hair just a fog.

Remember a time when someone arrived. When a friend walked through the gate at an airport and you greeted her or him. (Remember that this was once a possibility.) Examine that memory. Describe that memory. Pick out the details. Write it down. Look at the sheet.

It’s mostly a lie, isn’t it? The real memory, the one that you used as a scaffold for the story of the memory, probably looked like this out of focus woman on a pier. Mine do, anyway. Dore O. mined my brain. Or, more likely, her own brain. And then tried to film it. And found that her brain was full of vague bodies. Cut up bodies. Hazy bodies.

And all that lovely scenery? All of it just to frame those bodies. To contextualize those bodies.