The five women filmmakers in this session see cinema as a total medium for awakening the senses. In this programme, life and domestic rituals or gestation periods gradually give way to the exploration of sensuality and sexuality, the unconscious and desire, or delirium and trance. Here, sensory experiences lead to the most ecstatic fantasies.
The domestic portrait, at once familiar and spacy, in A Trojan House is built on the relationship between architectural and emotional structures. Sharon Couzin sees the house as a living organism, a space of order, protection and closure, but also as a weapon with which to conquer creative terrain. For her part, by means of elusive, ambiguous transitions, Chick Strand composes not so much the lyrical portrait of a person as that of their conscience. In Mujer de Milfuegos, repetitive daily tasks, converted into liturgical obsessions, are interspersed with desire and experiences of ecstasy and madness. The rituals of nature are also present in Trumpet Garden, where an environmental portrait is drawn in the superposition of visual and sound textures. Barbara Klutinis discovered an analogy between mysteries, joys and fears related to a garden and the emotional diary of her pregnancy.
“We are left with ourselves, and it’s only ourselves who make the visions and fulfil them. It is the image of the elasticity, tenacity and majesty of the human spirit that is the true romance for me”, wrote Chick Strand. Her portrait of the sexual fantasy of two women rests on skin and caresses in Fever Dream. Coni Beeson, a pioneer in the filming of explicit lesbian sex, also produces erotic portraiture activated by touch. She accumulates superimpositions to create a collage of fragmented bodies with the sea, the hills and the forests in which she fuses temporal rhythms in the sexual act. And, finally, Women I Love, a sensory portrait of girl friends and lovers from Barbara Hammer’s past lives is presented as a necklace: a fruit, a flower or a vegetable is attributed to the quality of each woman, differentiating the types of relationship in form and content. Hammer breaks the relation between subject and object, and includes herself in this celebration of completeness, reminding us at the height of tantric culmination of sexuality sustained that, at birth, we touch before seeing: a butterfly has landed on the images of masturbation.
A Trojan House, Sharon Couzin, 1981, 16 mm, 21’; Mujer de Milfuegos, Chick Strand, 1976, 16 mm, 15’; Trumpet Garden, Barbara Klutinis, 1983, 10’; Fever Dream, Chick Strand, 1979, 16 mm, 7’; Holding, Coni Beeson, 1971, 16 mm, 13’; Women I Love, Barbara Hammer, 1976, 16 mm, 22’
16 mm screening. Copies of Mujer de Milfuegos and Women I Love courtesy of Light Cone. Copies of A Trojan House, Trumpet Garden, Fever Dream and Holding courtesy of Canyon Cinema.
