Reviews

Gatherings, Ecopsychology Journal
Reviewed by Amy Lenzo

RETURNING HOME is a triumph, and a delightful surprise for anyone unfamiliar with Anna Halprin’s work. This short, stunningly photographed film, is an elegant treatise on death; not death as we humans have come to know it, but death as it is in nature - dynamic, and inextricably inter-woven with life.

Using an interview format that morphs comfortably into performance, this stirring production paints the screen with vibrant strokes of emotion. Together, Director and Cinematographer Andy Abrahams Wilson, along with Halprin and Artistic Director Eeo Stubblefield, have created a palpable on-screen sense of joy and communion. In performance, Halprin’s expansive gestures invite us to join the sacred ceremonies she is enacting before us; to bring our eyes and ears and hearts & share in her interactive dance with the natural world.

Whether wrapped in thin cotton membrane, clothed in a thick layer of moss and earth, or naked beneath sky-blue paint streaked with river clay, Halprin’s amazing 80 year old body somehow perfectly reflects the ancient memories and immortal youth embedded within the earth’s own aged, eternal form. The lines of her face conjure some elemental indigenous race, pierced with dark eyes bright as stars, and evoke a sense of unaffected reverence, for both her and the natural world that so permeates her work.

The film subtly reinstates us in our true relationship to nature, holding humanity and our lives within the context of the natural world’s vulnerability, its delicacy and violence. And yet, for all its thoughtfulness, RETURNING HOME is not a somber film. Eeo describes having been attracted to working with Anna because of her “childlike nature” and the “freedom of her imagination”, and both these attributes are apparent in this occasionally whimsical and playful tribute to a great artist and her work.

At one point Halprin says that these performances are like “rehearsals” for her own “passing over” into death, and that she always returns from them “reborn in some way.” After watching this film, I too felt renewed; in my appreciation for nature, and the power of art to bring us close to her, and in the potency and beauty of my own female body as a microcosm of the earth’s. This remarkable film, like Anna’s work, offers something rare in our modern culture, something that our species truly longs for - a vision of the way back home.

Find a way to see it!