Holly Zausner: Psychostasia

“Psychostasia“, the artist’s most recent film, follows a woman on her search for answers to universal questions about the human condition, through emotionally-charged interactions with the art and architecture of Venice.

The film shot entirely on location in Venice, opens with the protagonist (played by Holly Zausner) attempting to navigate her way through a large maze in search of a way out. The visual metaphor of a labyrinth serves as the guiding principle of the film – exploring meaning within our life choices and confronting ideas of mortality – taking her through a series of interior and exterior spaces in Venice and tracing a mazelike path that takes her deeper and deeper into the complex cultural history of the city.

In her quest for answers, the character passes through many sites in Venice, including the Galleria Franchetti, the Scola di San Rocco, the Palazzo Grimani, the St. Michelle island cemetery, and the Venetian School of Music. On her journey, she encounters lavish spaces housing the sculptures and paintings of Tintoretto, crosses the Grand Lagoon in a rowing boat at dawn towards St. Michelle Island (the cemetery island of Venice), and in the final scene, observes the details of a 13th-century Byzantine mosaic depicting the “Last Judgement”.

“Psychostasia“, which refers to the soul being weighed by divine authority in an act of judgment, is a concept that can be found in religions throughout the world, including Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. In Christianity, this weighing of the soul appears most often in the well-known form of the Last Judgment, which was an especially popular subject of medieval and Renaissance European art. Rather than investigating the human condition through the lens of religion, Zausner’s film asks us to consider how the humanistic traditions of the arts, as embodied in the cultural history of Venice, serve to guide us in this never-ending set of questions about human life.