Filmmaker Amy Ruhl is fascinated by the body in film, particularly when it becomes mutated, dismembered or perverted by the cinematic medium. For her Kinetic Cinema program presented this past Monday at Uniondocs in Brooklyn, she focused on the rich history of the female body in film, especially that most intriguing of female archetypes, the femme fatale.
In her first short film, “How Mata Hari Lost Her Head and Found Her Body” Ruhl reimagines the famous courtesan and spy as if she lived her life the way it ended (by execution with her body donated to science and her head put on display at the Musée d’Anatomie). Ruhl’s Mata Hari is quite literally a person split in her allegiances – between mind and body, warring countries, sexualities, high and low art. There was no reconciling her contradictions, and in trying to have everything both ways, she enraged the very public she was trying to seduce and was destroyed.
While Mata Hari’s career was spent mostly in the service of men, she really yearned for artistic legitimacy and coveted the role of Salomé (played by many lesbian performers of the time). Ruhl showed the ‘Dance of the 7 Veils’ from Alla Nazimova’s Salomé and explained the allure of the part this way:
“This clip illustrates my favorite part of the [Oscar Wilde] play, which is that everyone in the play is looking at another character and desiring them, but that character never looks back at them… King Herod is looking at Salomé very lecherously and his wife [Queen Herodia] is saying ‘Don’t look at her!’…Salome is looking at John the Baptist, who won’t look at anyone but up toward God, because he has this annoying piety…I think that it’s a really amazing, on Oscar Wilde’s part, critique of the sexual roles going on at that time in Victorian England, where nobody gets to have what they actually want…and this role really spoke to a lot of lesbian performers.”
In addition to Ruhl’s film and curated selections, two other experimental filmmakers, Amy Greenfield and Kerrie Welsh showed shorts and took part in the discussion.
Amy Greenfield’s Wildfire was made from footage shot of a multimedia, avant gard strip show. After looking at the footage of the show, she wanted to show a thread between her work and the early films Thomas Edison made of female performers dancing in the style of Loie Fuller, the most famous of which is Annabelle Dances. Made in 1894, Annabelle Dances is of Annabelle in a costume of billowing fabric that she swirled and moved in undulating and serpentine ways. The film was hand tinted in different colors to simulate the lighting effects of live stage shows. Greenfield opens her film with footage of Edison’s Annabelle Dances and dissolves into her modern version with nude women whirling fabric. The video was also hand tinted in a similar way to the early film and the rapidly shifting edits make the images whirl past the viewers eyes giving a spinning sensation to the watcher.
Kerrie Welsh’s Peter, Peter… draws from the aesthetic of home movies in the 1950s, and starts out showing a typical nuclear family in a nondescript suburb where everything is “hunky dory”. The mood quickly shifts as the pretty wife has an extramarital affair and the father goes into a jealous rage. A dark retelling of the children’s rhyme, “Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater, had a wife and couldn’t keep her. He put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well,” Welsh’s film shows everything that would never be included in a typical family home movie, and incases it all in a shell of normalcy.
Kerrie Welsh, Amy Greenfield, Anna Brady Nuse (moderator), and Amy Ruhl
The three filmmakers shared a mutual interest in the history of feminism in film, and a desire open up roles for women (and ways of interpreting those roles).
Greenfield commented, “What interests me, is living through 1980’s feminism, that what we’re doing, using the female erotic, not rejecting any aspect of the female and cinema, was a no no then – I was very persecuted. But audiences are coming around again to my films and it’s a wonderful time for seeing films like this.”
Kerrie Welsh replied, “One of the things I think is interesting [about Ruhl’s film], is the way it is engaging with all of these historical moments in a way that is also engaging with the film medium. So when you talk about the female erotic, I feel like [Ruhl’s Mata Hari] is really using performance, she’s using her own body, in a way that is referencing not some natural female eroticism, but all of these difference modes of performance that have been naturalized or associated with sexuality in various ways. I think the questioning of that in this really funny weird way is what speaks to me about the film.”
Ruhl explained that while Mata Hari never worked in film herself, she became a rich subject for other great actresses who depicted her on screen, including Theda Bera, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.
“What really interested me [about Mata Hari] was that she really defined this subset of femme fatale.”
Related articles:
- “Mata Hari, the Technologized Body: A Conversation with Amy Ruhl” by Kerrie Welsh, On-Verge
- http://www.uniondocs.org/2012-05-07-kinetic-cinema-with-amy-ruhl/
- Amy Ruhl on Vimeo
- Amy Greenfield articles in Move the Frame
- Flesh into Light: The Films of Amy Greenfield, by Robert Haller Intellect Press.