“This is a Film” is an evolving lecture-performance exploring what it means to turn footage into language. Using clips of family home movies found in various online archives, Chloë Bass creates a descriptive piece for the audience to hear and imagine. Where is the film: in the language? In the images that come into each listener’s head? Is it shared between us? What do we see, and how does it make a story?

Each time the lecture-performance is produced, it is revised and changed based on its context of presentation. No version is performed more than once. Each new edit reflects changes based on the specifics of the venue or organization presenting the work. It also strays further from direct description of the original pieces of footage. Where version 1.0 contained very little to distance the audience from the imagined visual of a single family at-home dance party, the subsequent versions have introduced descriptions of other clips, interjections, and moments of fiction, interpretation, and mystery.