MS Slavic 7 (Sofia Bohdanowicz, with Deragh Campbell, 2019)

This midlength film, about Audrey (Campbell), a young literary executor researching the correspondence between her great-grandmother, Polish-Canadian poet Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, and Polish-American writer / Nobel Prize nominee Jozef Wittlin, is starkly, startlingly material-oriented. Much of its running time is devoted to Audrey poring over the physical letters and artifacts from the Harvard Archives where Bohdanowiczowa's papers are deposited. We see the careful handling of envelopes and manuscripts, examined for clues to their fuller meaning.

I don't know that I've seen a film that has captured quite as perfectly the fundamental loneliness of intellectual endeavor. We see Audrey getting situated alone in her hotel room, and then working in the archive's reading room, and we watch her as she experiences the feel and the delicate presence of these artifacts. (This labor is contrasted with Audrey's somewhat awkward interactions at a large family gathering, and her terse, bitter exchanges with her aunt.) This is someone who seems to feel at home in the private life of the mind, or is at least finding her way through to that identity, one that her aunt (and we presume others) doesn't value.

Throughout the film, Audrey is commenting on the writing in the letters, and her interpretation of the literary and emotional bond between Zofia and Jozef. Eventually, we see that she has an interlocutor (Marius Sibiga), the translator she has hired to work on the letters. (Audrey doesn't speak or read Polish.) Amid discussions of the lexical peculiarities of the language, the two scholars gently disagree about the overall meaning of the correspondence and how it fits into the writers' overall literary lives.

Bohdanowicz conveys this all in mostly still, extended shots of matte, unadorned interiors. There is a plainspoken elegance to MS Slavic 7. (The title refers to Harvard's Houghton Library and its call number for the Bohdanowiczowa materials.) One is tempted to compare the film to other recent featurettes about scholarship and its milieu, such as Ted Fendt's Classical Period and Ricky D'Ambrose's Notes on an Appearance. But at the unpleasant risk of implying that Bohdanowicz has some sort of "feminine touch," there is a humility that pervades MS Slavic 7, a sense that the film is vulnerable, using intellectual conceits to disarm itself rather than bolster its confidence. This is a film about the love that stems from knowing you don't know.