IF A MOVIE, ANY MOVIE, WERE SET IN NEW YORK CITY THE SUMMER OF 2001 and its story ended before 9/11, it might well be near unbearable. Every gesture would be freighted. Every hope would glimmer with the possibility—nay, the fatedness—of sudden ruin and loss. A thought that came when I first saw a 40-minute video by a young Chicago video artist. Mary Scherer’s artfully artless The Index of Absence V. 1. In notes toward the project, Scherer writes in unalloyed academese, perhaps a reflection of it being a BFA project. But the result is furious, precise, elusive and alive. She used to work at a coffee shop near where I live and co-workers and customers of that café, most in their 20s, comprise many of the 35 participants. I’m acquainted with some of the subjects, but the result would be as powerful even if they weren’t faces I see regularly. Each collaborator is asked to address the camera as if it were someone they lost, in whatever sense of the word. Abrupt cuts to black between the 60-second vignettes are part of the phenomenal power of the best bits: don’t look away, don’t look away, look away, look away.
The structure is based on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief, from denial to acceptance, but the segments—the subjects—are compelling on their own. Some are cryptic, others elliptical. Early on, a woman against a white wall, a cigarette alive below the frame, with cascading curls and silent movie star eyes, fidgets before exploding in anger at another woman whose betrayal is unspecified. [“Jessie,” pictured.] Pages of writing are seen in mirror reflection along a hallway: a man enters, finishing a can of beer, strips down, leaves the frame, pitches himself against the pages, the wall. Again. [“Jeremiah,” also on the site.]
In several segments, grandparents are evoked, those gone before these twentysomethings were even born. A filmmaker positions herself in darkness before a window during a lightning storm, with crackling results. An open-faced woman worries about “this virgin thing,” and her lack of sexual experience. My favorite line of the summer past is in another, the heartbreaking “I would have loved to have gone trainhopping with you.” (“That day, grandma, you were a knockout,” also made me cry.)

A markedly bearish man begins to cry, recalling that the number of someone he’s lost is still on his cell phone. In almost total darkness, a man shrouded in a hoodie remembers a dead friend. Another subject’s face is rounded by a hoodie: cigarette smoke rises as, almost without blinking, she recalls how she’s grown strong because of her late mother’s failures, resolute beyond her years, steadfast and articulate. That’s “the nature of family legacies,” she says, coolly, impressively.
Each person shot their own footage. “I thought that the participant should have complete control over the way they were shot,” Scherer tells me. “I knew that some participants might want to say something, but hide their identity. I wanted it to be clear to the audience that the participants were not exploited,” that they wanted to be part of the project. “They controlled how they were represented, and I even gave them first choice over which one minute segment I used. However, most participants allowed me that jurisdiction. Some participants had their own camera and I simply sent them the video format (mostly mini-DV, but also Hi-8 and DV-Cam) of their choice, and they mailed me the tape. I provided a camera to about half of the participants. I chose the most compelling one-minute moment, and then arranged them in the five stages of grief. Since the participants knew that I would be choosing one minute, many tried to fit everything that they wanted to say into a minute, which is an impossibility. I wanted to find the tip of the iceberg.” It’s an endlessly malleable notion. Scherer intends to make two more, with the elderly, to “see what an 80 year old has to say about loss,” and then children.
The final moment of Absence is chipper and hale: a 27-year-old filmmaker in a bright, flowered dress displays a camera from her collection to her late grandmother and says, “This is the dress you made for mama when she was the strawberry queen.” It’s a radiant envoi.
Four segments are at the project’s website; this image is from “Jessie,” a segment that seems brittle and forced until a certain, not-safe-for-work utterance takes even her aback. I don’t know why it’s so affecting: but it is.

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