Entre Ville is a complex exploration of a distinct period in JR Carpenter's life. She created it as a way for others to experience her city as she does, and she employs many techniques to transport users into her mind and memory. Because of this, there is no doubt that Entre Ville encourages empathy and identification with a unique perspective.
This identification is achieved mainly through sensory overload. We see moving, living, breathing clips of the neighborhood and its smallest intricacies from the point of view of a handheld camera; we are not simply being shown back alleyways, but experience them as firsthand memories, though we only get a trace. The subjectivity is intensified by the sounds accompanying each place. By clicking on the No Dogs sign, we see the dog as he is described in the poem, his tags clinking together as he runs down the alleyway.
In other videos, we hear sounds from the street, like cars, birds, sirens, construction, babies crying, and people talking, yet we never see the sources of these sounds. There is a general sense of hopelessness and abandonment. In one video, the streets are covered in what can only be described as junk: toasters, lamps, and toys--pieces of lives left behind and forgotten. By documenting this, Carpenter captures the desolation of a neighborhood that once was lively and bustling. Most of her work derives from her feelings about change and "home".
In her poems, Carpenter describes her neighbors as she remembers them: the vulgar Greek woman, the French trumpeter, the sex-crazed couple upstairs, the child who peeks over her fence to spot the dog. We never hear the full stories of her relationships with these people, only senses of what they were like. These small fragments of experience combine to form a patchworked consciousness that is both nostalgic for the past and separated from it. Carpenter's videos were filmed long after the poems were written, and we sense this tension between past and present. This puts us in a position of longing, with each video representing a ghost of the past. Brief moments are weaved together and layered by text and mechanics to provide us with an overarching experience of Carpenter's years in Mile End. (Click HERE to learn about the use of fragmented memories in Emily Short's Galatea.)
Back to Introduction
Macin Sheeder
