Our Magnolia (2009)

Our Magnolia takes as its starting point the surreal landscape painting Flight of the Magnolia (1944) by Paul Nash, official war artist of World War I and World War II. In this context, the painting’s flower motif comes to represent the unfolding parachutes used by airborne regiments or artillery explosions. Nashashibi /Skaer’s film develops this reference with a series of enigmatic associations that form the thread running through Our Magnolia.

A shot of the half visible skeletal shape of a decomposing whale buried on a deserted beach echoes a drawing of a whale skeleton with the title Death, which is part of Leonora (2006), a work by Lucy Skaer also in the Hunterian collection. The images in the film are often as seductive as they are threatening, carrying the suggestion of impending disaster. At the end of the film, the soundtrack erupts from total silence with the anguished reaction of a woman to the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

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