My First Wife Stella, HD Video, Color, Sound, 33:07, 2013/19

My First Wife Stella (excerpt), HD Video, Color, Sound, 1:00, 2013/19

Daniel Terna’s My First Wife Stella (33 mins, 2013/19), is a still and moving image project inspired by the discovery of slide pictures that his father, Fred Terna, a Holocaust survivor and artist, made in 1967 while on a west coast road trip with his first wife, Stella, also a survivor. In the film, Terna retraces the route Fred and Stella took together and recreates compositions at the same locations the couple visited 45 years prior. Terna “was interested in seeing how the landscape had aged and if it was possible to sense Stella’s presence by absorbing the sites in front of me. Like my father, Stella was a holocaust survivor who had been traumatized by her experiences in the camps. One of the driving forces behind their trip was the hope that the landscape might have a therapeutic effect on her. I planned my destinations around the slide images, using them as if they were markers on a map. While there are no formal monuments in the photos, I treated each picture as a postcard commemorating a site.” In Terna’s yearning to see the past, the film documents the relationship he has with his father through the process of Fred’s retelling.

Edited by
Brennan Vance
Daniel Terna

Sound by
Brennan Vance

Color Correction by
Ben Neufeld

Special Thanks to
Rebecca Shiffman
Fred Terna

With Generous Support from The Cuts and Burns Residency at Outpost Artist Resources