There Was an Unseen Cloud Moving

A fragmented, experimental biography of the 19th-century poet and writer Isabelle Eberhardt, whose brief, unusual life ended abruptly in a flash flood in the desert. The tape makes no claims to telling the “truth” about Isabelle, choosing rumors about her tyrannical, nihilistic father, and her flight to Armenia, where she dressed as a man and “wrote one of the strangest documents a woman has ever given to the world.” Following Eberhardt’s travels and the strangely syncretic vision of her father, Thornton creates a portrait of cultural cross-breeding in which “neither this world nor the other remains.” In all, There Was An Unseen Cloud Moving is an arresting mixture of rare and iconic images that undermines its authenticity through re-enacted “historical” scenes and deliberate anachronisms that place Neil Armstrong in 19th-century Geneva.