“When I call to mind the memory of taking your picture, I see the picture.” 

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If we ever tried to track the totality of our lives, our essence, where would we begin? From our first memory? Or our recorded history of photo and video? In the era of readily-available technology, we often find ourselves relying on visual mediums to enshrine what we want to remember—letting the mundane or impressionable slip from our minds like sand. My Body is a Lens I Can Look Through With My Mind, directed by Ellery Bryan, revels in the spirit of the creator through poetic storytelling.  

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The poetry itself manifests threefold, in: text, spoken word, and visual composition. Though the text and spoken word align occasionally, each part aims to capture a different corner of Bryan; transmitting, reflecting, and refracting their essence like a lens.  

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The title lends itself to this concept, too. If we view the 16mm camera as Bryan’s body and mind, everything we see becomes a representation of them— and what we see is nothing short of perfect poignancy. The film says so, too, when the text asks “What is the story that I will tell you to understand my life?” followed by books about rocks, minerals, art, and land. Each image is finely, strikingly crafted to emphasize light, earth, memory, and character. Sometimes parts of their figure are obscured or imprinted upon, as if they were marrying themselves with the material. The moon they hold over their face or the geodes and fossils they press into their skin indicates a physical, bodily connection to otherwise inanimate materials.

 

They hold a magnifying glass and rectangular prism of quartz (or selenite or something similar) over words in a book, turning the objects into a lens–which has been established as synonymous with Bryan’s body– that bends the words/pictures beneath. The imagery moves beyond likening objects into particularly curated scenes. A two-dimensional easel of yellow tape with a sun-beamed canvas on a parquet floor gains a three-dimensional object of a vase they place or a cat they spot sunbathing. Small flags are planted around a grassy field and a spiral of rocks surround a mirror reflecting the sun directly into the lens.  

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While these are only a few striking images My Body is a Lens I Can Look Through With My Mind has to offer, they all contribute to the mystic nature of memory. Bryan’s film is not a shorthand version of what happened; but, rather, it is the threshold between their body (lens), mind, and corporeal experience. From a philosophical perspective, the sender, medium, and receiver are the filmmaker. They say “we forget the majority of what happens to us” and a framed note asks “Will you remember me when I’m gone?” If we imagine the camera as they ask us to, a representation of a lens, body, and mind, everything we see is a representation of them and their replicated memory. Consider André Bazin’s assertion of film being a replication of reality so we can better understand this sixteen-minute glimpse through the body and mind of Ellery Bryan– and the potential of autobiographical filmmaking.   

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- Kathryn Odum, BFA Film Production and BA English '26 Oklahoma City University

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Note: Ellery Bryan will be a panelist in the Friday panel: "Is Avant-Garde Our Last Defense?"