Inside the Dwoskin Archive

In 1994, 30 years after his arrival in London from New York, Stephen Dwoskin (1939–2012) assembled fragments from his personal archive to make a kind of autobiographical film. In Laura Mulvey’s words, TRYING TO KISS THE MOON “tells the double story of memory, bringing together the beauty of its documents and the sadness of its elusiveness.” In a memorable scene it shows Beatrice ‘Trixie’ Cordua viewing her first collaboration with Dwoskin, TRIXI (1971), nearly a quarter-century after its making. Dwoskin, however, deliberately eschewed information, names, dates, places. He made the documents themselves elusive, refilming from various screens rather than using conventional extracts.

This program, selected by the film historian Henry K. Miller, is the fruit of his immersion in Dwoskin’s archive, preserved after his death at the University of Reading in southern England. Using the paper and photo archive to make sense of the equally extensive video and film archive, it revisits the making of TRYING TO KISS THE MOON, revealing the significance of certain moments that Dwoskin included without explanation, including part of his abandoned early work Pot Boiler, filmed in New York around 1964, which features Yvonne Rainer. In addition to video “rushes” from TRYING TO KISS THE MOON, shot in 1993–4, it includes extracts from Dwoskin’s unreleased or later withdrawn films. The program will also include a full screening of TRIXI, as a tribute to Beatrice Cordua, a year after her death in 2025.

Dr Henry K. Miller was Senior Research Fellow on the Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin project at the University of Reading (2018–22). With Prof. Rachel Garfield he co-edited DWOSKINO: The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin, shortlisted for a Kraszna-Krausz Book Award. He is the author of The First True Hitchcock (2022) and editor of The Essential Raymond Durgnat (2014). He is a regular and longstanding contributor to Sight and Sound magazine and Senior Lecturer in Film at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.