Drifting towards Cosmopolis

Abstract

This is an artist’s text where an experimental filmmaker explores cosmopolitanism in her own work and that of others. Talking about eclectic cosmopolitan theory, this article maps the role of the wanderer in literature and film. Investigating the cross-pollination of image, sound and text in experimental filmmaking, the writer charts her own position as a mediator of cultural elements in a globalised world, and the implications of feminist subjectivity. The article charts the making of the author’s cosmopolitan films made between the late 1980s and 2015, as well as the development of a practice that reflects a transnational consciousness. The text embeds a discussion of diaspora, and of appropriation and citation as the inevitable result of accelerated media profusion. Jewish identity is explored through text, and a dialogue with the world, refracted through subjective bricolage. A contextual introduction to the author’s films, this text explores diaspora, nomadism and Jewish and feminist consciousness in a globalised world. The film draws on eclectic sources to describe an identity in flux and a rhizomatic rather than rootless relation to diaspora. The text references Henry James, Rosi Braidotti, Jacques Derrida, Chris Kraus and others to sketch a transnational vision of twenty-first-century cosmopolitanism and ecriture feminine.