Three Women, One Name

Three stretches of cloth thirty metres apart, two cuts, one question: who gets a name. A cleric reaches into an arch and touches a woman’s face, and the camera goes up into the stitching, to her name, Ælfgyva, in a Latin sentence that stops before its verb. King Edward is named on his deathbed. The veiled woman at its foot is not. Three men at a meal have their names stitched over their heads. A house burns, a woman and a child stand under it, and nobody in the frame is named. Worth waiting for: A woman under a burning roof, one hand holding a child’s, the other palm open toward the man with the torch. The caption over him says only that a house is burned.