ELLIOT MONTAGUE

MAINSTAY / 50 minutes, color, digital video, 2008

Mainstay approaches questions of the transgender body and loss through the representation of family dynamics within the context of rural landscape and culture. The film examines how three intersecting characters deal with grief and change in terms of both physical and imagined bodies in private and public realms. Mainstay plays with visual modes of understanding gender in order to complicate or undo popular representations of queer bodies.  The story is revealed through specific meditative visual approaches— the extension of time within a single shot, the exchange of intimacy between two figures within the frame, and the treatment of metaphor and construction of psychological space through the depiction of landscape.

Funded by the Princess Grace Foundation’s Graduate Film Award and the University of California, San Diego, Department of Visual Arts’s Russell Grant and the Humanities Grant