When you think of Surrealism, what do you picture? Dali’s melting clocks? A pipe that claims it isn’t a pipe? Maybe even a Neo-Dadaist-turned-Millennial-Meme video proclaiming “I’m still a piece of garbage,” as if it were a local television jingle. What you probably aren’t imagining is a middle-aged woman dressed in 19th-century mourning attire. In fact, it’s likely that you’ve never even heard of the acclaimed Canadian photographer Hannah Maynard.

Based on a 2001 play of the same name by Janet Munsil, Be Still is Elizabeth Lazebnik’s directorial debut. The protagonist, Hannah Maynard (Piercey Dalton), is central to a story we are all familiar with—the grieving mother set adrift after the death of her child. Picture this: Victoria, BC in the Victorian era; a man offering an unresponsive woman tea; a young girl made legible to us either through a vivid memory or as a spectral figure conceived through longing. While some may consider another bereaved mother narrative unremarkable, Hannah’s grapple with her grief through the practice of Surrealist photography, and the way Be Still’s form expertly mirrors the oftentimes disconcerting nature of her compositions, is anything but.

Be Still is a predominantly experimental piece that manages to avoid coming off as pretentious or forced. The film employs contemporary versions of the same techniques that the real Hannah Maynard crafted in the late 1800s, producing an inescapable air of gloom throughout. The most unsettling of these “trick shots” is the portrayal of multiple versions of Hannah within a single frame. Not only do these duplicates embody the liminality of loss, but they also reproduce the sensation of eeriness that one feels upon looking at the stoic black-and-white faces of people who have long since passed on. Lazebnik’s commitment to the subject matter of Be Still is evident in the way she seamlessly aligns the film’s story with its style.

While the way Be Still’s form and content reinforce one another is incredibly compelling, perhaps the most surprising aspect of this film is just how popular Hannah’s pre-Surrealist techniques continue to be today. Who would have thought that the rise of visual illusions on a social media platform like TikTok would have kept Hannah Maynard’s work relevant into the 21st century?

So, between Hannah’s artistic innovations predating the official Surrealist movement by four decades and the continuing trend of Surrealism in current media practices, why have we forgotten such a gifted local figure? The answer is both simple and poignant. The grief that drives Hannah’s creativity proves disruptive to her husband, Richard’s, life. Seen as a necessary evil and borne of a twisted sense of compassion by the men around her, Richard and the family doctor conspire to slip medicine into Hannah’s daily tea, highlighting the patriarchal tradition of undermining a woman’s autonomy, particularly when she does not fit neatly within male expectations. Hannah Maynard was a commercially successful portrait photographer, a Surrealist visionary, and perhaps most importantly, an extraordinary woman who explored her grief deeply. And as we all have come to recognize, extraordinary women, like Maynard, are so often excluded from our textbooks—a fact that the film’s largely female team does well to remind us of.

Be Still had its World Premiere at the 2021 Vancouver International Film Festival on Oct. 6, 2021, and will be screened a second time at Vancity Theatre on Friday, Oct. 8 at 4:30 PM. The film can also be streamed virtually online via VIFF Connect until Oct. 11, 2021.

Kate Wise is a graduate student at the University of British Columbia studying cinema and media. Her thesis research investigates the relationship between internet fan communities, Millennial/Gen Z anxieties exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the work of K-Pop group BTS as an antidote for those anxieties. In her free time, Kate enjoys K-Pop dancing, binge-watching TV, and perfecting her lasagna recipe. Follow them on Instagram (@k8theegrrr8).

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The (sur)Real Life of Hannah Maynard: Be Still at the 2021 VIFF