Returning (1980)

Handling

Looking outside and looking back in the same moment; the collision of memory and reluctance. In Returning Susan Stein achieves a simultaneous sense of identification and displacement by filming from the ‘inside out’ – a subjective camera places us inside a house, behind a door, peering through blinds – and from the ‘outside in’ through a voice-over whose broken streams of memory describes ‘her’: “Fragments – she arranged them as moments to be watched.” Filmed in black and white, it is though we were invited into the shadowy area of our own fragmentation, our own sense of stopping and starting.