Mare's Nest

We follow Moon through a post-apocalyptic landscape solely inhabited by children and a few animals. She is about nine, yet thinks like an adult. She shares her questions about evolution with a tortoise during an extended tracking shot and ponders the microcosmos of molecules and the macrocosmos of space.

Moon has a conversation in a mountain hut with an oracle and a translator about how words replace objects – a sequence of roughly 20 minutes based on Don DeLillo's one-act play A Word for Snow. Bumping and jolting along in a Seat Marbella, she continues her way to an unknown future.

Don DeLillo's A Word for Snow

A Word for Snow is a one-act play about climate change by the famous American writer Don DeLillo that few people know about: commissioned by the American theatre company Steppenwolf in 2007, performed at the London Literature Festival in 2012 and published in an edition of 100 copies with photographs by Richard Prince.

DeLillo fan Ben Rivers managed to get hold of one of these coveted books and asked DeLillo for permission to use the text. He changed the adult characters into 9-year-old girls and left the text intact. The prophecy that the physical world will disappear, leaving only words behind, is even more powerful now that it is spoken by children. Ben Rivers won the Eye Art Film Prize in 2016. Mare's Nest was screened in competition at the Locarno Film Festival.

Introduction by Marc Farrant

Marc Farrant gave an introduction on 3 March about the position of A Word for Snow in Don DeLillo's oeuvre. Marc Farrant is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Amsterdam. His recent research and teaching has specialized in the areas of contemporary American writing, post-postmodern fiction, and the literary and media cultures of the neoliberal and postliberal eras. He has written on Don DeLillo and many other authors - most notably Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee - for many reputable academic journals.