Complicating Indigenous Feminism: Shayla’s Story in ‘Imprint’

And the story imprinted is the story of colonization and domination, a story that has seduced Shayla in her role as an attorney. But another story is also imprinted in this woman, a story of tradition, memory, family, and the foundational principles of her Indigenous culture. As the film progress, Shayla starts putting the broken pieces of her experiences in Denver together with the visions and experiences of home in order to remember.

Written by Amanda Morris.

One of our biggest complaints as feminists is the absurd lack of smart, independent, savvy women as lead characters in films. You know, women characters who have lives and complications and thoughts that don’t constantly depend on a man’s validation or involvement. Well, have I got the film for you! In fact, I moved this one up in my queue because it not only passes the Bechdel test, it also presents a complicated view of Native American women that we rarely (if ever) see in mainstream Hollywood films. Plus, it is billed as a “supernatural thriller” or “ghost story,” which is perfect for the month that ends in Halloween.

I give you Imprint, produced by critically-acclaimed Cheyenne/Arapaho director Chris Eyre, directed by Michael Linn, and starring the confident and talented Tonantzin Carmelo (Tongva/Kumeyaay) and Carla-Rae Holland (Seneca/Mohawk), who both won awards for their performances.

Imprint Trailer:

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saYPpujKK8U”]

Imprint opens with a fast-paced, montage-style of images, views, and movement through a house, field, and barn; ostensibly the ghost’s point of view, which is immediately followed by a hard blackout cut to a protest outside a Denver courthouse. Signs that read “Our voices will be heard” and  “Stonefeather is a traitor” dot the crowd as they chant “He’s a good boy, help him!” This is our first introduction to the story that sets this film in motion, and its lead character, Shayla Stonefeather, a Lakota attorney rising in prominence within the American legal system who is successfully prosecuting a young Native American man for murder inside this courthouse. The protesters label her a traitor who has turned her back on her Lakota culture and fellow Native Americans. Shayla’s inner inner turmoil is evident on her face as she closes her case.

Tonantzin Carmelo as Shayla Stonefeather in Imprint.

Shayla is a cultural minority achieving great success in the American colonialist machine, but seems to understand the trade-off; her spirit and her culture suffer next to her American ambitions. She has a job to do and she does it, but clearly feels the toll. Shayla flies back to her childhood home on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota where she must reconnect with her past, re-embrace her culture, and confront her ghosts. Her mother, Rebecca Stonefeather, played by Carla-Rae Holland, welcomes her home with a hug and the warm sentiment, “Beautiful daughter,” in the Lakota language.

Soon after she arrives to find her father dying, Shayla begins having visions and encounters that are suggestively supernatural. The film unfolds in a somewhat non-linear fashion, melding past with present in a way that causes Shayla to question herself and her place in the community and the world. “What happened to you? What happened to the little girl who wanted to come back and help our people?” her mother asks, and Shayla says that she grew up, responding, “Our biggest problems are self-inflicted.” The conversation between mother and daughter about reservation realities is abruptly interrupted when Shayla’s father suffers an outburst, followed by one of Shayla’s visions that draws her outside to the barn with a loaded shotgun.

Dr. Kim Anderson (Cree-Metis) argues that “there are many kinds of feminism,” including her idea that “Indigenous feminism is linked to a foundational principle in Indigenous societies – that is, the profound reverence for life” (In Indigenous Women and Feminism, 81). In particular, Anderson suggests that “Indigenous feminism is about creating a new world out of the best of the old. Indigenous feminism is about honouring creation in all its forms, while also fostering the kind of critical thinking that will allow us to stay true to our traditional reverence for life. . .We especially need to learn about the feminist elements of our various Indigenous traditions and begin to celebrate and practice them” (Indigenous Women, 89).

This type of feminism that Anderson writes about is represented in Imprint. Shayla learns to listen and the medicine man, played by David Bald Eagle, tells her that the earth and its creatures, plants, rocks, and trees, “remember when we forget. The story forever imprinted on this land.” And the story imprinted is the story of colonization and domination, a story that has seduced Shayla in her role as an attorney. But another story is also imprinted in this woman, a story of tradition, memory, family, and the foundational principles of her Indigenous culture. As the film progress, Shayla starts putting the broken pieces of her experiences in Denver together with the visions and experiences of home in order to remember.

Variety called this film “an old-fashioned ghost story with a Native American twist.” All due respect to Variety, but that is a simplistic and colonialist view of Imprint, a film in which a Native American woman character remains center stage the entire 85 minutes. Yes, there are ghosts. And a great twist at the end. But this is so much more than a ghost story. It is Shayla’s story–a story that complicates our assumptions about representations of  Indigenous women, in films and in American culture.

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Awards for Imprint include the following:

American Indian Film Festival (2007), won Best Film, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actress

Cherokee International Film Festival (2007), won Best Feature

South Dakota Film Festival (2008), won Best Feature

Hoboken International Film Festival (2008), won Best Cinematography

South by Southwest FF (2007), Official Selection.

This film is available to stream on Netflix and as a DVD from Amazon.

 

Dr. Amanda Morris is an Associate Professor of Multiethnic Rhetorics at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania with a specialty in Indigenous Rhetorics.

 

 

 

 

 

Dead Woman Walking: ‘Phoenix’ and the Resurrected Femme Fatale

The femme fatale, then, embodies noir’s obsession with death – not only its inevitability but also its allure. Unlike the male hero, who strives to defy fate at every turn, the femme fatale is acutely aware of her vulnerability. As scholar Elisabeth Bronfen posits, she “accepts her death as the logical consequence of her insistence on a radical pursuit of personal freedom,” embracing ruin rather than wallowing in denial. It isn’t passivity so much as cynicism; as a woman in a patriarchal society, she’s familiar with the limits of autonomy and has no illusions of grandeur or righteousness.

This is a guest post by Amy Woolsey.

You can scarcely read a review of Phoenix, the latest movie by German director Christian Petzold, without encountering a reference to Vertigo. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 classic, Phoenix deals with trauma, mistaken identity, and male authority. Stylistically, it leans more toward restraint than melodrama, but it still makes use of double imagery and lush colors (red in particular) to create a surreal atmosphere that drifts through each frame like cabaret music onto nighttime streets.

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As in Vertigo, red suggests romance – and danger.

Both films also include a woman who comes back from the dead. In Vertigo, Kim Novak’s Madeleine Elster inflames the passion of Jimmy Stewart’s ex-detective Scottie Ferguson, only to apparently commit suicide halfway through the movie by jumping off a bell tower. Later, the grief-stricken Scottie runs into a woman named Judy Barton who reminds him of Madeleine, and he grows obsessed with molding her into his former lover’s likeness. It turns out that the two women are the same person: Judy had been impersonating Madeleine as part of an elaborate murder scheme. In Phoenix, Nina Hoss plays Nelly Lenz, a Holocaust survivor who gets surgery to reconstruct her mutilated face. When she reunites with her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), he doesn’t recognize her, but noticing a resemblance, he convinces her to masquerade as his “dead” wife so they can collect and split her inheritance.

The similarity isn’t a coincidence. Petzold, along with late screenwriter Harun Farocki, deliberately designed Phoenix as “Vertigo in reverse,” as he explained in an interview with The Film Stage:

“We always thought about the male perspective. We always thought about a man who creates a woman, but we never thought about the perspective of a woman… It was Harun that said we had to change the perspective, so we started thinking about what the male subjectivity had done to Kim Novak, and the studio system — to the actor and to the character in Vertigo. Why all these stories are made by men, huh?”

Far from a cheap gimmick, the point-of-view switch in Phoenix sheds new light on Vertigo and film noir, demonstrating how the genre has evolved since its World War II-era heyday.

As a genre, noir is somewhat nebulous. The term did not enter popular usage until the 1970s, applied in retrospect to a set of films from the 1940s and ‘50s with similar aesthetic and thematic qualities. Some critics don’t consider it a genre at all, but rather a cycle or style. Still, there are a number of conventions commonly associated with noir, from dramatic lighting that emphasizes shadows to a gloomy, even nihilistic mood, not to mention archetypes such as the world-weary detective and, most notably, the femme fatale – in the words of Roger Ebert, a woman who’d “just as soon kill you as love you, and vice versa.”

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Barbara Stanwyck epitomizes the femme fatale as Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity.

Vertigo was released at the tail end of the classic noir period, but Madeleine Elster still displays the characteristics of a quintessential femme fatale. Slender, white, and platinum-blond, she has a statuesque, if patently artificial beauty, her face blank in a way that conveys mystery rather than vacuity – a discomfiting amalgam of sensuality and reserve. Yet even as she emanates danger, an air of tragedy surrounds her. Madeleine is doomed from the moment she appears onscreen; we’d already heard Gavin, her husband, speculate that she’s being possessed by the ghost of her suicidal great-grandmother, causing her to act “like someone I don’t know.” She may be an agent of death, but she’s also captive of it, perpetually haunted by the specter of her mortality. At one point, she tells Scottie that she feels “as though I’m walking down a long corridor that once was mirrored… and when I come to the end of the corridor, there’s nothing but darkness. And I know when I walk into the darkness that I’ll die.”

The femme fatale, then, embodies noir’s obsession with death – not only its inevitability but also its allure. Unlike the male hero, who strives to defy fate at every turn, the femme fatale is acutely aware of her vulnerability. As scholar Elisabeth Bronfen posits, she “accepts her death as the logical consequence of her insistence on a radical pursuit of personal freedom,” embracing ruin rather than wallowing in denial. It isn’t passivity so much as cynicism; as a woman in a patriarchal society, she’s familiar with the limits of autonomy and has no illusions of grandeur or righteousness. Judy describes her reunion with Scottie as “the moment I dreaded and hoped for,” suggesting she expected and possibly wanted to be found (she did stay in San Francisco and keep several items of clothing she’d worn as Madeleine). She accepts the immorality of her actions and the futility of avoiding retribution.

In theory, Madeleine’s “suicide” should humble Scottie, a reminder of his own vulnerability. But being a noir hero, he shuns enlightenment and clings to the very American, very masculine belief that individuals have absolute mastery over their destinies and the world around them. His efforts to manage Judy stem from not only male hubris, but also an obsessive need to regain a sense of control and repel knowledge of life’s impermanence. Instead of directly confronting his guilt and failure, he deflects blame onto Judy, convinced that by vanquishing her, he can attain redemption and subdue his inner turmoil. While driving back to the bell tower where Madeleine died, Scottie declares, “There is one final thing I have to do and then I’ll be free of the past.” Novak’s dubious expression articulates what her character has no doubt learned: you can’t escape the past.

A more prevalent interpretation of the femme fatale reads her as a male fantasy, a screen onto which spectators can project their erotic desires. Although the narrative often penalizes the hero for succumbing to lust, it implicitly encourages the audience to participate in his temptation, establishing his point-of-view as dominant and rarely developing the woman beyond her surface. As Laura Mulvey’s oft-cited male gaze theory goes, men look, while women are looked at. Is it any wonder that the most memorable image from Vertigo is a shot of Madeleine sitting in front of a painted portrait, her back to the camera? She’s anonymous, part of the surrounding artwork. In this case, the femme fatale doesn’t personify fate but transcends it, her temporary demise and subsequent resurrection reinforcing her abstract nature – her fluid identity, otherworldly glamour, and general elusiveness. She’s not mortal because she’s not real. If that sounds contradictory to the “femme fatale as the essence of mortality” theory, it’s because the femme fatale is a fundamentally contradictory figure: elegant yet violent, volatile yet cunning, egocentric yet self-destructive, catering to female empowerment yet also male pleasure.

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Hitchcock frames Madeleine herself as a work of art.

At Vulture, Angelica Jade Bastién lamented that noir has shriveled into an empty shell of its former self, tending to appropriate the genre’s most superficial aspects (the violence, the hardboiled dialogue) while neglecting its underlying meaning (the commentary on power, sexuality, deviance, and the American Dream). As a result, the femme fatale has lost much of her potency. Her influence is visible in the demented predators of psychosexual thrillers like Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct and the ravishing, albeit ultimately harmless sirens of neo-noirs like L.A. Confidential and Drive, but these characters lack their predecessors’ complexity and subversive edge. Along with David Fincher and Gillian Flynn’s twisted romance Gone Girl and Alex Garland’s sleek science-fiction parable Ex Machina, Phoenix takes strides toward salvaging the modern femme fatale, playing with perspective in order to deconstruct gender dynamics and genre tropes.

By situating her at the center of the story, Phoenix grants Nelly an agency Madeleine was denied, turning her into a fully realized individual with her own arc and interior life instead of a mere manifestation of the male hero’s subconscious. Behavior that could come across as illogical and contrived makes sense because Petzold exhibits genuine interest in understanding Nelly and what drives her. Without compromising subtlety, he peels back the layers of his heroine’s enigmatic façade, hinting at her willful nostalgia (she implores the surgeon operating on her face to make her look how she used to) and simultaneous, conflicting urge to find the truth about her husband. Hitchcock, meanwhile, never bothered to devise an explanation for why Madeleine/Judy goes along with Gavin’s plan to murder his wife; she just does what the plot requires of her.

It’s clear right away that Nelly is not a conventional femme fatale. She first appears huddled in the passenger seat of a car, her face covered with bandages and shadows – a stark juxtaposition from Madeleine’s introduction in Vertigo, with Scottie furtively eyeing her emerald-clad figure as Bernard Hermann’s score swells. There’s no attempt to hide Nelly’s fragility; as she wanders through the desolate streets of postwar Berlin, she seems to fade into the background, a ghost haunting ruins. Here, the false death illustrates the effects of trauma, the feeling of having witnessed the end of the world and no longer belonging in the present. Johnny’s manipulation isn’t just inconvenient for Nelly; it’s oppressive, a refusal to acknowledge her personhood. When the bandages come off and she undergoes her transformation, Nelly starts to occupy more of the screen, but that initial sense of alienation and repressed anxiety lingers, etched in Hoss’s searching gaze and tentative walk.

Especially telling is the scene where Nelly enters Johnny’s basement, looking like her old self for the first time. The camera establishes a close-up of her shoes before gliding upward, revealing her body in fragments as she descends the stairs. It’s a familiar technique, used to elicit awe at a female character’s appearance in movies as varied as the Bette Davis romance Now, Voyager and the James Bond-esque spy romp Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. In Phoenix, however, the sequence unfolds with an unease that defuses the sensationalism and, as a result, undercuts its effectiveness as a tool of the male gaze. Gone is the mystique that shrouded the femme fatales of classical noir; we’re too conscious of Nelly’s suffering to romanticize her. That’s not to say she is depicted as weak: even at her most ostensibly docile, when Johnny dictates her appearance and movements, Nelly is in command of the narrative. She obtains power not through violence or seduction but knowledge, her willingness to exploit the discrepancy between her real identity and Johnny’s perception of her.

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A silent power struggle

Noir is traditionally regarded as the realm of men, with its unsentimental look at crime and corruption. Yet, at its best, the genre has always been as much a portrait of femininity as of masculinity, showing how women navigate and resist the social, moral, and sexual standards imposed on them. After all, one of the reasons for its enduring popularity is its fascination with outsiders, the people lurking in the margins and dark corners of society. Phoenix succeeds where so many have fallen short because it recognizes the value of women’s experiences, presenting a heroine who exists for her sake, not the hero’s, who is neither vilified nor fetishized. At last, the femme fatale manages to transcend the male imagination and become human – free.

 

Amy Woolsey is a writer living in northern Virginia. Since graduating from George Mason University in May, she has started interning at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. She spends her free time consuming, discussing, and generally obsessing over pop culture. You can follow her on Twitter and Tumblr, and she keeps a personal blog that is updated irregularly. In addition to freelancing at The Week, she wrote about The Bling Ring for Bitch Flicks’ “Unlikable Women” theme week.

 

Recommended Reading

The Modern Femme Fatale in Nicolas Wending Refn’s Neo-Noir Drive

No Place for a Woman: The Family in Film Noir

Vertigo by Jim Emerson

Hoss Is Boss: The Enigma of Christian Petzold’s Muse by Scott Tobias

 

 

Lies The Government Tells Us: ‘(T)ERROR’ Plus New Lyric R. Cabral Interview

To see a portrait of the inner workings of the FBI we have to look to films like the new documentary, ‘(T)ERROR,’ co-directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, which opens in the US starting tomorrow, Oct. 7.

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The following is partly a repost; scroll down for a brand new interview with filmmaker Lyric R. Cabral

In most movies, US government agents, whether they are from the FBI, like Mulder and Scully, or from the CIA, like Melissa McCarthy’s character in Spy, invariably play the hero (or heroine) thoughtful, competent, and above all, ethical. The news tells a different story; FBI protection was a key factor in organized crime head Whitey Bulger escaping prosecution for his crimes (which included murder) for decades. When the FBI was investigating the Boston Marathon bombing they interrogated an unarmed immigrant friend of the bombers, and even though he was not implicated in the crime they shot and killed him. Only a few months ago, after targeting a Boston-area Muslim man with surveillance for a number of months, the FBI (teaming with local police) stopped him near a CVS parking lot to “talk” to him. They ended up shooting him dead right there–at 7 a.m. on a workday morning.

To see a portrait of the inner workings of the FBI we have to look to films like the new documentary, (T)ERROR, co-directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, which opens in the US starting tomorrow, Oct. 7.  In a highly unusual coup, an FBI informant Saeed aka “Shariff” (who used to be Cabral’s neighbor) agrees to be followed by the camera (though he complains to Cabral during closeups, “You’re always getting the fucking headshots”) as he talks about his past cases and sets up a current one.

Saeed is an older Black American Muslim whom we see pull up stakes from his home (so he is away from his young son) and his job as a cook in a high school cafeteria to move to a strange city with his dog and his weed, working on getting entrée into the life of a younger American jihadi, Khalifah al-Akili, who makes mildly inflammatory YouTube videos but seems not to do much else. We see Saeed haggling with the FBI about money (he does not seem to earn much–at all–for his efforts) and admonishing them to stop being so obvious about setting this guy up.

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Meanwhile, al-Akili, using Google and a piece of mail he sees on Saeed’s car dashboard figures out his FBI connection early in their acquaintance. We find out later that Saeed started his career with the FBI because he himself was charged with a crime, and then set up a man who was a friend of his to escape punishment, a chilling reminder of the questionable use of informants in the US justice system. This cycle perpetuates to the end of the film–someone barely getting by (al-Akili lives in public housing and does not seem to have a car) preyed upon by someone nearly as desperate, Saeed, as the FBI eggs him on. Saeed seems unrepentant about his targets, saying, “I don’t have no feelings for them. You making the Islam look bad, you gotta go,” but as he smokes blunts and bakes a succession of cakes he seems bent on convincing not just the directors and us, but himself too.

Interview with Lyric R. Cabral

I talked to Lyric R. Cabral, the co-director of the film (who has also worked as an acclaimed photojournalist) by phone a week after the back story behind (T)ERROR was featured on a segment of This American Life.

This interview was edited for clarity and concision and contains spoilers.

Bitch Flicks: When you first knew Saeed, and he was your neighbor and you were spending time hanging out in his apartment, did you ever think, not that he was an informant, because that seems so far-fetched, but that he wasn’t being 100 percent truthful with you?

Lyric R. Cabral: He had a lot of marijuana, like pounds of it in his place. And lots of money there too. One time he took out $2,000 (in cash) right in front of me. But I was busy. I was a student, so I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to fact-check him.

BF: After you found out he was an informant and you knew how much he had lied to you and everyone else was it difficult for you to trust other, new people that you met or believe what they said?

LRC: No, because I feel like I’m a good judge of character in spite of everything–and I didn’t feel like I would know two informants.

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BF: Although Saeed sometimes complains when you film him in the movie, he did agree to be in this documentary, which you remind him of. Why do you think he did agree?

LRC: It’s his personality; he’s anti-authoritarian. He’s always kept papers, like old plane tickets that prove that he was in Germany at a certain time as, like, a fact check. And he knew because of the way I’d been with him, even after I found out he was an informant, that I would be fair. Not that I would idealize him but that I would be fair with him. I also think he thinks of his legacy. He has a 9-year-old son and some medical issues, so I think he wants to leave behind some answers for him.

BF: Previously, Saeed had turned in a friend of his, who, we find out in the film was pretty clearly entrapped. Saeed puts up a big front onscreen, but do you think he regrets this or any of the other times he has helped put someone in prison?

LRC: Tariq says they were friends, but Saeed says they only got to know each other as part of the sting operation. The FBI tries to match up people who have the same personality traits (as informant and target). Saeed did start to like him, but by then, because Saeed was wearing a recording device, he couldn’t really stop the operation from happening. The most he could do was turn the device on or off. So he would turn it off when Tariq would start talking about certain things. Or so he says. I do think Tariq weighs heavily on his mind, especially because he will be getting out (of prison) in two years.

BF: You’ve said that you became a filmmaker because you felt your work as a photojournalist sometimes couldn’t tell the whole story. Did you ever feel your previous work had been misunderstood?

LRC: Not really. But you can only show or say so much in a photo and a caption. I felt like filmmaking could show more nuance.

BF: I know you had a successful crowdfunding campaign after the film was completed and shown at festivals because legal worries made insuring the film very expensive. Has the FBI, which doesn’t come off very well in the film, contacted you or your co-director? Have either of you had any experiences that made you think you were being followed or otherwise spied on?

LRC: We tried to get a comment or statement from the FBI back in October of 2014 and they still haven’t given us one. We haven’t been harassed at the border when we have traveled internationally with the film. I did get a piece of malware on my computer though. After we were on Democracy Now someone sent me an encrypted message offering more information–and the keys (encryption) didn’t match up. So then I just emailed the address (without encryption). I got an attachment and my computer started acting crazy. We’re trying to track down who sent the attachment now.

BF: In the film, what turn of events or detail surprised you the most?

LRC: When Khalifah al-Akili was arrested. He was going to give a press conference the next day (about FBI harassment/entrapment). He had just gotten a plane ticket (to get to the conference) 12 hours before. I was surprised how quickly the government can act when they target someone.

BF: (T)ERROR is your first full length documentary. Do you have any advice for women who are making their first documentaries?

LRC: Patience. For anyone starting out, that’s my advice. Filmmaking can take a lot longer than you think. And unexpected expenses can come up, like the (high) insurance premium we had to pay. We started filming in October of 2011 and the film is being released this October, so that’s four years.

BF: Has either just knowing Saeed or making the film changed how you think about the government?

LRC: I didn’t realize how much an informant could set up, that the informant isn’t just observing but is acting and leading. I’m surprised by how much the government depends on these human relationships (between the informant and the target). (Cabral asked the following to be included in this answer in an email she sent shortly after the interview.) I would add, that first meeting Saeed, at the age of 19, informed me that I am a person of surveillance interest to the US government, particularly the FBI. Saeed’s disclosure, which in a way I appreciate because it told me that in essence I was a POI (person of interest), assures me that the government has taken interest in my journalism, personal activities, and social network (at the least because these are things which I openly shared with Saeed, throughout our relationship). Thus I have been able to adjust my communications and behaviors, knowing that active government surveillance may be taking place.

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘Sleepy Hollow’: The Phoenix Rises From Its Ashes?

While the episode wasn’t perfect we can only hope that ‘Sleepy Hollow’ will pull off what it has planned and at least for the time being there’s no need to dust off the #AbbieMillsDeservesBetter hashtag.

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This is a guest post by Giselle Defares.

Will FOX be able to save Sleepy Hollow? That was the question that bothered critics and fans alike these past nine months. Not since NBC’s Heroes has a show sunk its own ship from season 1 to 2. FOX and TPTB promised to reboot the story and go back to the magic of season 1.

In the wake of the season 3 premiere this has to be said. The bar for Sleep Hollow’s promotion was set very low and they still missed the mark leading up to the premiere on Oct. 1. All the budget on FOX must have gone to the Empire promo but there had to be someone in the PR department who could have thought of utilizing social media to drum up the interest and the show’s scattered fan base (at least earlier than a week before the show starts). It’s ridiculous that Emmy-winner Viola Davis drummed up more buzz for Nicole Beharie in her speech than the PR department has accomplished in three seasons. That is something else.

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There were many things that had to be dealt with in the first episode. There was a nine-month time jump, the broken relationship between Ichabod and Abbie, Jenny back on the forefront, the introduction of two new characters, and last but not least: the case of the week.

In the opening we’re directly introduced to the new villain Pandora (Shannyn Sossamon), who captures the Headless Horseman into her box (or in her own words “it’s more of a dowry”) whilst singing a song. By capturing the Headless Horseman, Pandora gave the box “the power of death” and thus she was able to summon the yaoguai. This is a battlefield demon who paralyzes people and feeds on their fear, which ultimately kills them. This was a great move to tie up the storylines of season 2, hand the baton from one villain to another, but leave the door open. Sossamon plays her role well and it’s interesting to note that during one episode she successfully performed more magic than Katrina in two seasons. How’s that for progress?

We find out that Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie) has moved on with her life and is fully focused on her career. She finished her training with the FBI and is now a working agent under the leadership of her new mentor Mitch Granger (C. Thomas Howell). During their bust of the multi-state drug trafficking ring – with the cheesy name Anaconda- she receives a phone call with news regarding an old friend.

After the loss of his wife Katrina and son Henry in the season finale, Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) told Abbie that he was going to “clear his head” and then never came back: “I required solitude. Then it became a habit. A deeply regrettable one.” This was a nice touch. He was grieving after all and needed time to find himself again. Ichabod traveled back to Scotland and searched for answers in his family’s tomb. He found a 4,000-year-old tablet marked with Sumerian engravings which translated to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” OK.

Ichabod travelled back to the States and his family heirloom ensured that he got locked up and he has been in the custody of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement for five days before he called Abbie. The reason? He was ashamed and the necklace that Abraham gave Katrina (that contains his soul) lost its power, which means that something is wrong with the Headless Horseman, and they need to find out what it means. (Side note: Team Witness was still in sync during their time apart since they opted for the same haircut.)

The scene of the first demon attack is in a national park. Two men end up dead and the authorities suspect an animal attack. Abbie knows the area and states that it doesn’t have the right kind of predators. It was a nice moment to see the dynamic between the two. Ichabod the believer and Abbie the sceptic working together as a team; both brought their knowledge to the table. Or as Ichabod dramatically states, “Evil has returned to Sleepy Hollow.”

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The duo heads back to the archives and there’s a lovely reunion with Jenny Mills (Lyndie Greenwood). Unfortunately, Irving won’t be coming back but Jenny explains what happened to him and hints that she helped him disappear. Jenny now works as a paralegal and is slowly finding her way back into society. She helps Ichabod and Abbie find out what the substance is that they found in the national park. She quips, “I spent years recovering obscure artifacts from all over the world – this is what I do.” Amen.

It wouldn’t be Sleepy Hollow without a historical connection and a flashback. They find out that when Benjamin Franklin wrote about the “red devil” at Bunker Hill, it didn’t refer to the redcoats names but to the yaoguai. In the flashback that follows we find out that it was Betsy Ross (Nikki Reed) who delivered the message to Colonel Prescott and thus turned history at Bunker Hill. While Sossamon fares well in her role, Reed doesn’t really make a lasting impression. In part because she didn’t really have much to do in her scenes. Her foreshadowing with the line “one day you’ll meet someone who make you forget all those manners” was a nice touch. It’s certainly funny that all the female characters of Ichabod’s past – historic icons no less- have been sexified and all have romantic ties with Ichabod. Betsy Ross felt modern, thus out of place and was dressed like a lost extra on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Abbie is pulled back into work mode when the FBI receives a tip on their drug bust. She finds out that aggression and gunpowder attracts the yaoguai. Unfortunately, the yaoguai paralyzes her mentor Granger and slashes his throat. Why does she need to lose her mentors this way? Abbie does fire some shots and injures the yaoguai, which is a surprise to Team Witness since the demon is supposed to be invulnerable. The yaoguai has one weakness: it can be wounded when its eyes flash white in order to steal someone’s fear. Whilst Abbie is focused on the drug ring. Ichabod and Jenny hastily conduct a plan to trap the yaoguai. It seems to go well but in the end it’s Abbie who saves the day.

The episode is definitely miles better than most of season 2, yet there are some things that are hit or miss. There was no need for an Asian drug ring just because Team Witness was dealing with a Chinese demon. Hopefully Betsy Ross will be less bland in the upcoming episodes. The dialogue is sometimes very on the nose. Whilst trying to find out what demon there up against, Ichabod finds a book where it states that the demon looks for fear and it’s a servant not a master, to which Jenny states: “ Meaning that someone summoned it here, someone evil.” Jenny had some other questionable lines such as “ Guns, knives, things that go boom. We’re back in the demon-fighting business and I think we’re going to need them.” Alright, didn’t think of that. By the way, we still don’t know how Ichabod was able to travel to Scotland (and back) and how he made his living in the past year. How Sway? At least he’s entertaining the idea of finding a job.

While the episode wasn’t perfect we can only hope that Sleepy Hollow will pull off what it has planned and at least for the time being there’s no need to dust off the #AbbieMillsDeservesBetter hashtag.

 

Giselle Defares comments on film, fashion (law) and American pop culture. See her blog here.

 

‘Equals’ Is an Interesting If Not Especially New Portrait of Mental Illness

Drake Doremus’ dystopian science fiction movie, ‘Equals,’ presents a pretty good metaphor for mental illness – just not a very challenging one.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Drake Doremus’ dystopian science fiction movie, Equals, presents a pretty good metaphor for mental illness – just not a very challenging one.

Kristen Stewart _ PLANET_250815_equals4

Equals, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival this year before coming to TIFF, is set in a future society where people have been genetically engineered not to have emotions. It’s strongly implied that this is the basis for the false utopia the characters live in, where they all wear the same clothes, and live in modular apartments, solving puzzles in the evenings, like so many rational Vulcans. It’s an interesting idea – I, for one, would have liked to hear the characters explain what the purpose of human life was, and why they bothered showing up for jobs, if they didn’t feel any way about anything – but the movie isn’t interested in how this civilization works. Instead, it’s just set up as vaguely bad and communist, in a way that borrows from Nineteen Eighty-Four and other works that came before it, without exhibiting the same interest in social critique.

Instead, the focus of Equals is on personal, idiosyncratic experiences of not fitting in, or being labelled deviant, ill, and outcast because you don’t feel the right way.

The action kicks off when the main character, Silas (played by Nicholas Hoult), develops a rare condition known as SOS. His genetic programming fails and his emotions switch back on, leading him to have a panic attack in his apartment. Trusting the system, he turns himself over to the medical authorities and learns that the prognosis isn’t good. There is no cure for SOS and, while medication can slow the condition’s progression, sufferers eventually become so unstable that they have to be quarantined inside an ominous facility known as the DEN. Living conditions in the DEN are so deplorable that most patients kill themselves within days of arriving and, in fact, they’re encouraged to do so, because the horror of living with emotions is more terrible than death.

Silas, bummed out by this diagnosis but trying not to be, lest he get sent to the DEN, begins to suspect that one of his coworkers, Nia (Kristen Stewart, in one of her best performances yet) is also suffering from SOS, but trying to hide it. The two strike up a friendship that turns into a romance as they bask in the relief of having someone else to talk to about what they’re feeling.

Unfortunately, physical contact of any kind is strictly prohibited in this randomly (and somewhat senselessly) dystopian society – for reasons that, again, I would have been interested to hear about – and, as soon as their fingertips brush, Silas and Nia are on the path to being discovered, with predictably tragic results.

 equals

Equals has amazing sound design and a handful of beautiful shots, but it’s not winning any points for originality. The setting is sketched out in pretty vague terms, and the plot doesn’t offer many surprises. If you’re feeling churlish, you can spend all 101 minutes asking why questions that don’t have any answers. Equals isn’t really interested in its own setting except in so far as it establishes the concept “People living here are suspicious of feelings.” And the reason it wants to establish that concept is because the story is really a metaphor for mental illness, designed to tell us that we are too quick to medicate and suppress people whose feelings aren’t normal.

The story in Equals is structured to cover as many contemporary attitudes toward mental illness as possible, and to explore the way that different characters relate to SOS. Nia, distrustful of the system and scared of ending up in the DEN, never tells anyone what’s she’s experiencing and deals with it herself. It takes all her energy, every day, just to act normal; to not let anyone see that she’s different. On the other hand, Silas trust the system and ends up a with a medical record that follows him wherever he goes, counting down the time until he winds up in an institution. Arguably, things are easier for him because he can take medication to suppress his feelings, but he goes back and forth about whether it’s worth it to do that.

Part way through the movie, he joins a support group for other people who have SOS, where each person has a different opinion about how to see the condition and how to live with it. Over the course of the film he goes on a journey where he starts out waiting for a cure and later comes to believe that SOS is a natural part of who he is, and that the real problem is the way everyone else is reacting.

The questions that Silas struggles with are really important and really integral to the lives of people with long-term mental health conditions – especially ones that affect personality development and aren’t going to go away. Is this me or a disease? What does it mean that I’m different from everyone else – am I worse, am I better, am I equally good this way? If someone could cure me tomorrow, would I want to take the cure? Who would I be, if I did?

The metaphor works really, really well. What’s more disappointing is that the movie doesn’t seem to have an interesting perspective on the answers to those questions. Instead of challenging us, it takes the easy way out by setting up a situation where Silas and Nia are clearly correct in their beliefs while everyone else is just… well, crazy. It’s much more like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest than Benny & Joon – Doremus and scriptwriter Nathan Parker make it easy for us to sympathize with Silas and Nia to the point that a lot of the complexities are lost. Of course it’s better to live in a world where people feel something rather than nothing. Of course people should be able to talk about their feelings with each other. Of course it’s good to fall in love with someone. There are never any negative sides to SOS except that The Man is against you.

This Right Side, Wrong Side, Fight-The-Power-For-Your-Right-to-Be-In-Love stuff not only makes the story less challenging – it also makes it less interesting. The story never swerves away from predictable plot developments and, like a train conductor calling out the stops before you arrive, Equals mechanically foreshadows each and every one, suggests the most obvious possible outcome, and then delivers that outcome on schedule. I’d make a joke about Chekov’s cure for SOS and the convenient six-hour lag time before it goes active, but then I’d be telling you how the movie ends just as blatantly as the director does.

Look – there are things to like about Equals. Kristen Stewart’s good in it, the editing is very well thought-out and emotionally evocative, the sound is really good, and, hey – the metaphor is really good, too. But I wish that the metaphor were in service of a message I haven’t heard before.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

‘Fear the Walking Dead’: Melvin Was My Ride

I mean, if I want to see an obscenely wealthy, morally repugnant real estate magnate battling mindless zombies, I’ll just watch the Republican presidential debates again.

The first season of AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead is over, and it wasn’t everything we’d hoped. Not that our hopes were that high. After all, as I noted last week, after a strong pilot episode, it took The Walking Dead until well into its fifth to become the type of compelling, frightening, and morally complex work we’d hoped for from the beginning. And we’re still not 100 percent convinced we’re there yet. The gore helped tide us over. We are horror fans after all. But the weak characterizations, sometimes plodding storytelling, and the show’s embarrassing representation of women and non-white characters severely dampened our enthusiasm.

Fear started out with an advantage in the casting of Kim Dickens, who doesn’t know how to play a boring character. She gave us a way into the new series, and Madison was immediately a stronger presence than any of the women on The Walking Dead, at least up until Michonne’s (Danai Gurira) arrival. The writing on the new show hasn’t been impressive, in terms of plot, dialogue, or characterization, but the cast, overall, has been strong (again, Frank Dillane’s slightly over-the-top performance as junkie Nick has grown on me) and Dickens is the backbone of that cast.

ftwd nick and mad

There are several prominent Latino characters on the show, which you’d think would be standard for any show set in 21st century Los Angeles, and while some of them are problematic, they’re not presented as stereotypes. The three most prominent Black characters on the show died hasty deaths, and the introduction of the mysterious, manipulative Strand (Colman Domingo) was intriguing at first, but this week we learned that he seems to be a shady real estate broker, which is much less interesting than anything I might have speculated about his background. I mean, if I want to see an obscenely wealthy, morally repugnant real estate magnate battling mindless zombies, I’ll just watch the Republican presidential debates again.

The episode begins with a few nice shots of a full moon over a rapidly disintegrating Los Angeles, and then we’re at that arena full of zombies that Daniel (Ruben Blades) found out about from National Guardsman Adams (Shawn Hatosy) last week. You remember, by having his daughter Ofelia (Mercedes Mason) lure him to their house, tying him up in the basement, and torturing him. That act and its consequences hang over the season finale like a toxic cloud.

Anyway, Madison, Travis (Cliff Curtis), Daniel, the mildly traumatized Ofelia and those pretty but annoying teens, Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie) and Alicia (Alycia Debnam Carey) are leaving town before… well, before something bad happens. (It’s not really clear what the military’s plan is for greater Los Angeles. Adams seemed to be saying that they’d all be wiped out to prevent the spread of the zombie infection, which, in this paranoid anti-government fantasy, makes a kind of sense, but on this episode we see Dr. Exner [Sandrine Holt] arranging for a helicopter to carry the wounded to safety. Why would they take a bunch of critically injured folks away and wipe out everyone else? It doesn’t pay to think too much with this show.)

ftwd liza and doc

Before they can head east, they need to get into the medical compound, and rescue Nick and Liza (Elizabeth Rodriguez) and Griselda, who has already died from her injuries, but they don’t know that.

After getting the information he needs, Daniel is ready to murder Adams, but Travis intercedes, pointing out that Adams can still help them find their loved ones at the compound. Madison, apparently now okay with torture and murder, tells Travis he has to take Adams in his truck. With the others driving off, Adams convinces Travis to let him go, because otherwise Daniel will definitely kill him. Seems reasonable.

The gang then drives to a parking garage I guess Adams told them about, where for some reason they leave Chris and Alicia with the cars and head into the compound. This show is like a primer on bad parenting. I’m sure Chris and Alicia will be fine, right? What could go wrong?

Because the place is still heavily guarded, Daniel has a plan. An illogical plan that will put his own loved ones in harm’s way and cause the deaths of many innocent people, but still a plan. I just wished the show had shown Daniel setting things in motion instead of having it be this funny reveal, where he tells the soldiers guarding the compound, who threaten to shoot him as he approaches, “You should save your ammunition,” and then casually nods his head toward the zombies coming around the bend. Yes, Daniel has freed the zombies from the arena — thousands of them — and somehow this groaning, shuffling mass of undead has gotten to within a few hundred feet of the compound without anyone noticing it. Let me just state it again: Daniel freed thousands of flesh-eating zombies from the arena and led them to the medical compound. You know, the one he thinks his wife is inside. The one where the National Guard are holding hundreds of innocent people, including Nick. Again, what could possibly go wrong?

ftwd daniel

Well, a lot, it turns out. Daniel’s zombie pals successfully distract the soldiers, but, their job done, they continue to advance on the compound. Eventually, they break through the fences. Because the compound’s been breached, Dr. Exter finds out that the evac has been put on hold. She orders her staff (including Liza) to run while she “takes care of” the wounded. With chaos ensuing, Strand uses the key he stole to get out, taking Nick with him. As the place is overrun with zombies, Strand refuses to help the other prisoners trying to get out of their cages, and Nick just goes along. Later, Madison and Travis pass through the same corridor, and decide to free who they can. Hooray, humanity!

ftwd nick and strand

Strand has plans to meet up with that Guardsman he gave his watch and cufflinks to, Melvin (Toby Levins). Melvin is still alive when they find him, but he’s badly injured. Worse yet, his legs are being eaten by a zombie. Strand must really treasure those cufflinks, because he goes over and takes them back. Melvin’s legs must be super-delicious, because the zombie doesn’t even look up from his meal.

Eventually, Madison, Travis, Nick, Strand, Daniel, Ofelia, and Liza come together and, after a few close calls, make their way out of the facility. Thankfully, Travis has finally stopped trying to reason with the undead.

ftwd ofelia

While all that was happening, Chris and Alicia were hiding in the car in the parking garage. Some guardsmen found them and demanded their SUV, but not before making us worry that maybe they’d sexually assault Alicia. The show cuts away from this heated confrontation in the parking garage, and when the rest of the characters arrive, Nick and Alicia are nowhere to be found. This gratuitous creepiness concludes with Nick and Alicia bursting into the parking garage exclaiming that they’re alright. They were just hiding in a stairwell or something! What a relief.

ftwd chris alicia

But, you know, just when it looks like a happy ending, despite all the death and destruction their rescue operation caused, up pops Adams! It’s not clear why he’d bother sticking around to get revenge on Daniel, but there he is, in the parking garage, pointing his gun at Daniel, before he gets even more irrational and decides to shoot Ofelia instead. And then Travis jumps on him and beats him to a pulp.

Now, from the show’s perspective, it’s clear that Ofelia getting shot is Travis’s fault, for being a big ol’ softy and letting Adams go, as opposed to maybe being Daniel’s fault, for using his daughter as bait to lure Adams in so Daniel could bound, gag, torture, and — if everything had gone according to plan — murder him. Shame on you, Travis! You’re still living in the old world!

ftwd adams

Now that everyone’s together, and Ofelia’s okay — just a flesh wound — they all follow Strand to his place, a luxurious gated mansion on the Pacific coast, which he has stocked with supplies. Like Daniel, though I guess for different reasons, Strand is alarmingly well-prepared for the zombie apocalypse. It’s almost like they wanted it to happen. Strand tells Nick they’re not staying, though. “The only way to survive in a mad world,” Strand says, “is to embrace the madness.” But really, they’re just going to get on his fancy yacht and sail away.

Before our “heroes” sail into the sunset, Madison follows Liza out onto the beach, where Liza reveals that during all the chaos escaping the compound, she got herself a zombie bite. She wants Madison to put a bullet in her head, just like Madison asked Liza to, back when they saw what happened to her neighbor Susan. “Come on,” Liza goads her, “You never liked me that much.” What a trouper. I don’t know why these folks don’t get further from the house, or find a quieter way to kill one another, but Travis follows Madison out to the beach, and decides to take matters into his own hands, shooting Liza in the head, which of course brings the kids running. Guns are loud! Then Madison and Travis sit on the beach and cry as the tide comes in, shedding tears over not just Liza, but their lost innocence, and perhaps, I’d like to think, their contractual obligation to appear in 15 more episodes of Fear the Walking Dead next summer. It’s true what they say. You can’t save everyone.

ftwd trav and liza

 

Recommended Reading

Fear the Walking Dead Pilot: Can It Be More?

Fear the Walking Dead: The Black Guys Die First

Fear the Walking Dead: Liberals Try to Stop Zombies with Words!

Fear the Walking Dead: I’m From the Government, and I’m Here to Help

Fear the Walking Dead: It’s Torture!

 

 

 

Vintage Viewing: Maya Deren, Experimental Eccentric

A student of journalism and political science at Syracuse University, Deren was politically engaged. Her master’s, however, in English and symbolist poetry, point to her contrasting impulses towards abstraction and the poetic. Touring and performing across the USA with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, Deren met the Czechoslovakian filmmaker Alexander Hammid in Los Angeles, and produced her first and best-known experimental film in collaboration with him: ‘Meshes of the Afternoon.’

Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.

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Maya Deren: spacetime surrealist

Born Eleanora Derenkowsky in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1917, the Derenkowsky family fled antisemitism to arrive in New York in 1922 and take the name Deren. Maya Deren became a pioneer in the development of experimental cinema in the USA. Like Germaine Dulac, she was film theorist as much as director. As a dancer and choreographer as well as poet, writer and photographer, however, Deren placed her own body at the centre of her most famous works, becoming a performance artist in a way that Dulac did not. Deren experimented with superimposition effects, and the unifying of diverse spaces through the movement of her body to create enmeshing, hallucinogenic dreamscapes recalling Alice’s trip down the rabbit-hole. Her film symphonies are composed using rhythm and the repetitions of ritual to probe questions of identity and the forces entrapping her heroines. Deren was an auteur in the fullest sense: director, writer, cinematographer, editor and performer.

A student of journalism and political science at Syracuse University, Deren was politically engaged. Her master’s, however, in English and symbolist poetry, point to her contrasting impulses towards abstraction and the poetic. Touring and performing across the USA with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, Deren met the Czechoslovakian filmmaker Alexander Hammid in Los Angeles, and produced her first and best-known experimental film in collaboration with him: Meshes of the Afternoon. Marrying Hammid and moving back to New York, Deren took the name Maya, the Buddhist term for the illusionary aspect of existence and, in Greek mythology, a messenger of the Gods. The film critic Thomas Schatz has pointed to Meshes as the first example of “the poetic psychodrama” a “scandalous and radically artistic” form of art film that “emphasized a dreamlike quality, tackled questions of sexual identity, featured taboo or shocking images, and used editing to liberate spatio-temporal logic from the conventions of Hollywood realism.” In this respect, poetic psychodrama was an important source for the art of music video, which illustrates the circular rhythms and alternative moods of the music, rather than limiting itself to the logic of linear storytelling. Though her work was silent, almost musical rhythms of repetitions and variations were central to all Deren’s films.

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As an independent distributor, Deren exhibited her films and gave lectures on them across the USA, Cuba, and Canada, helping to nurture a D.I.Y aesthetic of countercultural arthouse film, directly inspiring Amos Vogel’s formation of Cinema 16, a film society promoting experimental films in New York. In 1947, Deren won the Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prix Internationale, before receiving a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to research Haitian voodoo ritual, shooting over 18,000 feet of documentary footage and publishing the study Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Deren became a participant in the ritual and was initiated as a priestess, while remaining simultaneously an academic observer. Tensions between observer and participant were a running theme of her work. In the late 1950s, Deren herself formed the Creative Film Foundation to reward independent filmmakers. Deren died in 1961, aged just 44. She remains a key influence on New American Cinema, homaged by creators such as David Lynch.

Meshes of the Afternoon – 1943

“Everything that happens in the dream has its basis in a suggestion in the first sequence – the knife, the key, the repetition of the stairs, the figure disappearing around a curve in the road.” – Maya Deren

A luxurious Hollywood villa becomes an entrapping nightmare in Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren’s most influential film, where cycles of images become the meshes that bind the heroine. Opening with the delicately feminine image of a bare arm placing a flower carefully onto the ground and abandoning it, the heroine’s shadow, apparently detached, returns to grasp the flower before her body reenters the frame. Fragments and glimpsed body parts resist the tendency of cinema to pan over and survey women, defining Deren’s heroine rather by her actions and movements as the propulsive agent of the film, which shares her gaze as it roams over the house. A lost key falls downstairs in dreamlike slowmotion. A knife stabbing bread unites the feminine domesticity of cookery with a hint of violence. What is the meaning of the tall black figure whose face is a mirror as (s)he steals the heroine’s flower? Death? A male partner onto whom she projects herself? Stairs twist and distort around the angles of her writhing body, like an M. C. Escher optical illusion, until the heroine is looking down on the sleeping self that had started by imagining her. Key objects – knife, record player, key, flower – jump into new positions regularly, further destabilizing the reality of the film’s location and the logic of its timeframe. In an iconic image, the second “dream” version of Maya stands framed at the window, wistfully observing yet another version of herself performing the same looped actions she has just completed. Key becomes knife becomes key: death the only release? Seascape becomes patio becomes carpet in the space of a few steps, making a mockery of Hollywood realism in favor of dream logic. The knife-wielding version of herself becomes a male partner who wakes the dreamer, hangs up the phone and restores spacio-temporal logic. But another leap, from flower to knife, shatters the mirror (or illusory maya?) of reality to reveal a seascape beyond, and the man returns to find his floor covered in mirrored shards and his apparently dead lover draped in seaweed. Where was the “reality” within these meshes?

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSY0TA-ttMA”]

At Land – 1944

“The whole is so related to every part that whether one reads horizontally, vertically, diagonally or even in reverse, the logic of the whole is not disrupted, but remains intact.” – Maya Deren

Like an informal sequel to Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land opens with the heroine lying washed up on a wild seascape whose waves flow backwards upon the opening of her eyes. Driftwood appears beside her and becomes a magically distorting staircase similar to the central staircase of Meshes of the Afternoon. In this case, climbing the driftwood leads Maya to a long dining table full of leering, gossiping, and judging society faces. Crawling down a table and jungle simultaneously, Deren links these wildly different spaces through the movement of her own body. The dinner party ignores her, making her existence seem unreal in their mundane space, while the leaves bend before her reality. Finding a chess board at the end of her crawl, Deren moves the pieces telekinetically, using the movements of her eyeballs alone, a taken piece falling through a hole in the rocky seashore and being swept away by the tide as Deren chases it, in another circular return to the original space. A man joins her on her solitary walk down the countryside – the first living person to interact with her. As the camera switches back and forth between the figures, a different man is substituted for the first, slyly playing an identical role. A third substitution, and the figure is Alexander Hamid, familiar as the male figure in Meshes of the Afternoon. Following him into a wooden hut, she crawls underneath and rises in an empty space of covered furniture, which tents and reveals yet another man. Dropping a cat, Deren walks away through repetitive sequences of door frames that lead her back to the rocky coast (or a cliff of scaffolding?). On the shoreline, two women play chess while chatting – is it a comment on the competitive nature of society? Is Deren herself a lost piece, swept away on the waves and unable to join in? She bends back the heads of both women and strokes their hair while they smile ecstatically, all united on one side in a sensual break from the competitive edge of game logic. Abruptly Maya is doubled – one thief stealing a chess piece and running away with it, another still joined to the female players in smiling sisterhood, watching the runaway with puzzlement. Alternate selves from the stages of her journey turn to frowningly watch the rebel runaway. Her footsteps leave tracks in the sand as she vanishes into the distance, destination unknown.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQw9UX0gN7E”]

Ritual in Transfigured Time – 1946

“And what more could I possibly ask as an artist than that your most precious visions, however rare, assume sometimes the forms of my images?” –Maya Deren

With collaborators Rita Christiani, Frank Westbrook, and Hella Heyman, Ritual in Transfigured Time expands on the experiments in time and space of Deren’s earlier films. Rita Christiani plays a double for Deren as Maya performs ritual repetitions or is frozen in time. Christiani’s outstretched hand moves in slow trance to encounter Deren and complete her wool-gathering. Slow motion is intercut with speeded time to give a surreal edge to the domestic chore, under the stern gaze of a third, older woman – the monitoring mother figure? A party freezes as Christiani enters the doorway with her ball of yarn, and now she is a nun bearing lillies – do they speak to her dislocation from everyday frolics? A dancing partner ends her nun costume and sweeps her into the repetitive rhythms of the house party, where entranced guests bounce from partner to partner. She strikes a pose with a man’s lips intimately brushing her cheek, and instantly they are transported to a garden, where three women play like Botticelli’s three Graces. Christiani and Westbrook dance in the garden, showing Deren’s dance background very clearly in their sinuous movements. As Christiani leaves the dance, she becomes Deren again, watching in perplexity like a dreamer awoken. The three Graces are spun by Westbrook, each falling into their own dynamic freeze frame. Dancing figures become statues on pedestals as Christiani re-enters the garden. Westbrook’s jerky motions, achieved by intercutting with freeze frames, bring him to life and frighten Christiani, driving her away, pursued by Westbrook now in leaping slow motion. Finally, she is Deren again, fleeing through waist-high water and then falling in eerie negative exposure to reveal herself as Christiani once more. The film achieves a sense of dream logic while celebrating the human form in its full variety of poses and rhythms.

 [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IG5K65gkTU”]

Maya Deren’s experiments with rhythm and form through editing draw on a long Slavic tradition. In particular, they draw on the groundbreaking film theory of Sergei Eisenstein and Kinoglaz. Kinoglaz was the partnership of Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Svilova. Though Vertov is usually credited with its achievements, Svilova was a formidable documentary film director in her own right. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Elizaveta Svilova, Mastering Montage. Stay tuned!

 

Brigit McCone writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and boring people with lists of forgotten female artists.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week – and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

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What to Watch During TCM’s Trailblazing Women by Marya E. Gates at Rotten Tomatoes

Prompted by ACLU, EEOC Begins Investigation into Gender Discrimination in Hollywood by Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood

Muted Explores What Happens When Black Girls Go Missing by Anita Little at Ms. blog

Al Jazeera Launches New Documentary Series Showcasing African Women Making Change Via Local Projects by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

“How to Get Away With Murder” Brings an HIV-Positive Character to Primetime by s.e. smith at Bitch Media

Priyanka Chopra Talks Bollywood, Diversity on TV, and What’s Ahead This Season on Quantico by Sona Charaipotra at Vulture

A Brief History of The Queen of Sci-Fi Cinema, Sigourney Weaver by Maddy Myers at The Mary Sue

How ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Is Embracing Female Empowerment Like Never Before by Lesley Goldberg at The Hollywood Reporter

 

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

‘Felt’: When the Final Girl Comes Home

While the exact parameters of Amy’s scarring experience are never disclosed, hints are dropped, including an awkward conversation about date rape and the artist’s newfound fixation on creating nightmarish costumes featuring exaggerated genitalia and blank faces. We know, without having to ask, that Amy has endured some sort of sexual violation, visited upon her by a man.

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This is guest post by Claire Holland previously appeared at Razor Apple and is cross-posted with permission.

The majority of horror movies end with a “final girl” (so christened by Carol J. Clover in her pioneering book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws) conquering her attacker and would-be murderer in a final battle: Sally Hardesty bellowing in the back of a pickup truck as it drives away from Leatherface, who waves his chainsaw in useless frustration; Ginny Field stabbing Jason with his own machete; Sydney Prescott shooting Billy Loomis between the eyes as he lunges toward her in a failed attempt at one last assault. All of these women literally and figuratively stick it to the man, and by extension, to the patriarchy, if only temporarily. But what happens to these final girls – both fictional and, all too often, real – after the credits roll, and they are expected to reintegrate into a society that remains unchanged by their personal traumas?

That is the inherent question in Felt, a micro-budget indie film from Jason Banker about an artist, Amy (Amy Everson, also the co-writer), recovering from an unnamed, but easily assumed, ordeal. While the exact parameters of Amy’s scarring experience are never disclosed, hints are dropped, including an awkward conversation about date rape and the artist’s newfound fixation on creating nightmarish costumes featuring exaggerated genitalia and blank faces. We know, without having to ask, that Amy has endured some sort of sexual violation, visited upon her by a man.

It’s a classic setup for a rape revenge movie, except that there is no rapist–not a specific one that we meet, anyway. Felt is missing the inciting incident, which is surely a deliberate move. Whether or not a rape occurred is beside the point – the point is that Amy obviously feels deeply, painfully intruded upon in one way or another. She continues to feel further invaded and degraded throughout the film, while socializing with her roommate’s aggressive boyfriend or while on a first date with a man who becomes exasperated when she doesn’t acquiesce to his desires. In this way, the audience feels the buildup of these small and not-so-small intrusions along with Amy, from strangers and friends alike. Unlike your typical rape revenge movie, there is not one rapist, not one villain at which to lash out, but rather potential villains everywhere. Society is the villain, and Amy is just doing her best to cope with this new reality.

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Her method of coping, and to an extent fighting back, involves frequent use of the aforementioned costumes. Most of them are grotesque caricatures of the male form – Amy roams the woods in a beige leotard with a large, dangling penis and a yarn head; another suit features freakishly bulging arm muscles that she pretends to flex, the camera panning down to her breasts, bound and flat. She dons a mask with tufted hair and stubble when her roommate tries to talk to her about her strange behavior. As things grow too somber, Amy sticks her tongue out of a hole in the mask, causing her friend to physically recoil. The suits are armor and weapon combined.

Later, Amy takes part in a seedy hotel room photo shoot, but instead of getting naked for the pimp-like photographer, she shows up wearing fake padded breasts and a pair of granny panties adorned with a lurid, intricate cloth vulva. The photographer uncomfortably tries to laugh it off and turn her away, but she and the other model, Roxanne, end up taking over the shoot, asserting their power in a situation where they previously felt powerless. The two women become fast friends, instantly linked by a shared mistrust of the opposite sex and, as Roxanne puts it, a desire to “leave [their bodies].”

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The friendship is knocked off-balance when the two meet a guy named Kenny at a bar. The encounter begins as just another bonding activity of sorts for the women – Amy and Roxanne pick Kenny up, but then abandon him on the side of the road, laughing hysterically. Later, though, Amy runs into Kenny on the street and they seem to connect, resulting in a tentative, tender relationship that Roxanne has trouble accepting. Because this is a horror movie, we know that nothing good can come of it.

From there, Felt follows the familiar trajectory of the rape revenge flick, and the ending feels as inevitable as it does predictable. That, too, seems deliberate. When a person is stripped of her agency and her humanity, sometimes the only option she can see is to strike back. The movie meanders, often sacrificing tension or a cohesive narrative for the dull ache of authenticity, merely putting off what we know is to come. The sheer predetermination of the story may well be its message. We watch as the plot marches toward its inexorable conclusion, the cycle of violence playing out yet again.

 

Claire Holland is a freelance writer and author of Razor Apple, a blog devoted to horror movies and horror culture with a feminist bent. Claire has a BA in English and creative writing, but she insists on writing about “trashy” genre movies nonetheless. You can follow her on twitter @ClaireCWrites.

 

 

‘Stonewall’ Under Fire

The director missed an important opportunity to bring visibility to a highly marginalized and forgotten about group of people with ‘Stonewall,’ but instead he made a film that was more easily digestible for a mainstream audience. It comes as no surprise then that members of the queer community have had such strong negative reactions to the film.

This is a guest post by Danika Kimball.

Throughout his career in Hollywood, Roland Emmerich has built a career on destroying the world with mutant lizards, global disasters, and aliens. Many critics who have seen his latest film Stonewall, have come to the conclusion that he has created “yet another disaster movie” by masking a violent protest led by radical queer women as a coming of age story for an attractive white male. Some reviewers have gone so far as to say, “There are not enough bricks in the world to throw at Roland Emmerich’s appalling Stonewall.”

The film has been under fire since the release of its trailer in early August, with hundreds of thousands of members of the queer community boycotting its release. Rightfully so, given the erasure of trans womyn of color, butch lesbians, drag queens, homeless queer people, sex workers, gay, bi, and pansexual people who actually put in the grunt work during the riots.

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Image Courtesy of USC

Emmerich’s erasure of the Black transgender women who incited the riots is a disappointment in and of itself, but when you analyze the statistics for LGBTQ representation in film, the numbers are even more bleak. Professors at the University of California’s Annenberg School of Communication analyzed 100 of the most popular films in 2014 and found that out of 4,610 speaking characters, only 19 total were either gay, lesbian, or bisexual. There were zero transgender characters.

The director missed an important opportunity to bring visibility to a highly marginalized and forgotten about group of people with Stonewall, but instead he made a film that was more easily digestible for a mainstream audience. It comes as no surprise then that members of the queer community have had such strong negative reactions to the film.

Emmerich has responded to the harsh criticism in one of two ways. In an interview with BuzzFeed, he claimed that putting the character Danny at the forefront of the drama was a conscious choice to appeal to both gay and straight people. Later on he remarked that he put a white gay male in the film because he himself is white and gay.

Other times, the director has responded to criticism with a well-intentioned “Kum bah Yah” sentiment, trying to tug at the heartstrings with a “we are all in this together” speech.

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Roland Emmerich responds to Stonewall backlash

Though his comments are certainly well intentioned, Emmerich exemplifies an attitude that many cisgender white gay males share: the idea that all queer people share the same oppressions. But it’s harmful to assume that there is a blanket of oppression over the entire LGBTQ community. In focusing on how all queer people suffer from the same oppressions, Emmerich ignores the ways in which race, class, ability, and gender identity intersect to create different levels of oppression.

Emmerich’s experience as a cis white man is very different than the trans women of color who should have been represented in the film. This fact makes the erasure of the Black trans leaders who were at the core of the Stonewall riots all the more problematic, and impossible to stomach.

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Reactions to Emmerich’s Facebook post

Another thing I found interesting about Emmerich’s sentiments on Facebook is his emphasis on LGBT homeless youth. The only seemingly positive headlines surrounding the film seem to be because of Emmerich’s activism in this arena. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Emmerich expresses that one of the driving forces in the film centered on the story of homeless gay youths who fought bravely in the Stonewall riots. While homelessness in the LGBTQ community is a problem that needs to be addressed, it’s troublesome that it’s being filtered through the lens of someone who believes all queer people are going through the same struggles.

In the year 2012, the homeless population was at a staggering 633,782 people throughout the United States. Mental health issues, addiction, physical health issues, and domestic violence were among the main reasons contributing to this number, according to research conducted by Professor Kelly A Schwend of Bradley University’s Department of Nursing.

LGBTQ individuals represent a significant portion of that number. According to the Williams Institute, 40 percent of homeless youth identify as LGBT, 43 percent of clients served by drop-in centers are LGBT, and 30 percent of outreach clients identify as LGBT. These individuals experience a higher percentage of violence, abuse, and exploitation compared to their heterosexual peers. Transgender people are particularly at risk due to a lack of cultural acceptance, and are often turned away from shelters, making them susceptible to even more abuse and violence.

Other studies suggest that Black people represented nearly 40 percent of the U.S. homeless demographic, a startling number when you also consider that according to the U.S. census, Black people make up only 13.2 percent of the U.S. population as a whole.

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All of this information paints the picture that Black trans women are in all likelihood the most susceptible to experience violence and homelessness at some point in their life. Black trans women were also the most active in instigating the riots in the first place, so tell me again why these women are underrepresented in the film itself?

From his actions in erasing these women from his film, a historically dramatized narrative, it becomes hard to argue that he is concerned about anyone who isn’t a cisgender white gay male. Again, this isn’t to say that Emmerich wasn’t well intentioned in pointing out the problem, but reinforces the idea that he might not be considering intersectional points of identity when doing so.

Emmerich expressed to Vulture that he believed the film represented the diversity of the Stonewall clientele (around 70 percent Black/Latin@) “very well,” but if the trailer and reviews are any indicator we’ll be seeing more what we see in all of Hollywood: a white man in the foreground, and the people of color behind him. I mean, the still from the climax of the movie speaks for itself.

All in all, Stonewall was a film with great potential, but this fictionalized version of the story changed the narrative from one that was about violent, radical resistance, to a watered down coming of age story for a young cisgender white man. Once again, a gay white male becomes the face of a movement, and historical narratives of the rest of the queer community are erased.

 

Danika Kimball is a musician from the Northwest who sometimes takes a 30-minute break from feminism to enjoy a TV show. You can follow her on twitter @sadwhitegrrl or on Instagram @drunkfeminist.

 

 

Call For Writers: Violent Women

In the month of Halloween, we’ll be examining tropes of women and violence. There are many permutations of violent women throughout history and throughout genres. What is the connection between femaleness and violence? Why do we sometimes accept some types of violent women but not others? What do these value judgments say about our society?

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Our theme week for October 2015 will be Violent Women.

In the month of Halloween, we’ll aptly be examining tropes of women and violence. There are many permutations of violent women throughout history and throughout genres. In many cases, the viewer experiences the violence of female characters as empowering. Revenge and self-defense are frequent motivations for violence, which are often coded as justified, and audiences can bathe in the cathartic violence of Kill Bill‘s Beatrix Kiddo (aka The Bride) taking vengeance on her rapist and those who betrayed her and left her for dead. We can cheer on Ripley in Aliens or Laurie Strode in Halloween because they are acting from the basic animal instinct of self-preservation.

Many women glory in the model presented by the physically capable, self-assured women of sci-fi and action genres like pre-apocalypse soldier and mother Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and secret agent extraordinaire Mallory Kane in Haywire. Films like these give women the opportunity to revel in strong female bodies and in women who take charge.

Sometimes, though, violent women are coded as frightening and unknowable. They violate cultural mores. They cannot be contained within society and must, therefore, be destroyed. The eponymous heroine of Carrie is a young, timid woman who comes of age and finds enormous power inside herself, but such a power cannot be controlled or understood; it has no other choice but to obliterate itself. The film Monster, represents Aileen Wuornos, a real-life woman who had every hard luck in life, as a woman who takes revenge too far until she’s an out-of-control serial killer who must be executed. On the other hand, through the desperate and violent shenanigans of its heroines, Thelma & Louise accuses the world itself of being an ill-equipped place for women who refuse to play by rules that only subjugate them.

What is the connection between femaleness and violence? Why do we sometimes accept some types of violent women but not others? What do these value judgments say about our society?

Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Friday, Oct. 23, by midnight.

Carrie

Under the Skin

Foxfire

The Matrix

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Ginger Snaps

Basic Instinct

Foxy Brown

Battlestar Galactica

I Spit on Your Grave

The Exorcist

Underworld

American Horror Story

Game of Thrones

Hard Candy

Duke of Burgundy

Haywire

The 100

Jennifer’s Body

Single White Female

Misery

Mad Max: Fury Road

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Halloween

Alien

Sin City

Batman Returns

La Femme Nakita

Planet Terror

Aliens

Gone Girl

Friday the 13th

Kill Bill

Monster

Mommy Dearest

Thelma & Louise

Audition

‘Viaje’ and ‘Love Between the Covers’: Women Who Aren’t What We Expect

What will surprise no one who reads ‘Bitch Flicks’ is: films directed by women and told from a woman’s point of view are often the last to get distribution–and more likely to have limited theatrical runs or are released only on VOD and streaming services, skipping theaters entirely. Two great films by women I saw during the spring are still very much on my mind and will be playing film festivals in October.

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Going to film festivals means watching the sometimes dispiriting process of which films get picked up for distribution and which ones languish: the best documentary I saw last year, One Cut, One Life didn’t get its brief, limited theater run until this spring, 13 months after I’d seen it. At the same time, an offensive piece of pap like Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (which shared some of the same elements with One Cut, One Life) was everywhere, at least until word-of-mouth could debunk the puzzlingly rapturous reviews it received.

What will surprise no one who reads Bitch Flicks is: films directed by women and told from a woman’s point of view are often the last to get distribution–and more likely to have limited theatrical runs or to be released only on VOD and streaming services, skipping theaters entirely. Two great films by women I saw during the spring are still very much on my mind and will be playing film festivals in October.

Writer-director Paz Fábrega’s Viaje (non-Spanish speakers: say “bee-YAW-hey”) which plays the London Film Festival Oct.11 and Oct. 15, is the more realistic counterpart to Sleeping With Other People (which I enjoyed in spite of its conventionality) in its portrayal of how couples meet, pass the time and get to know each other. Shot in lustrous black and white (by Esteban Chinchilla) the film follows two Costa Ricans in their late 20s, Pedro (Fernando Bolaños) and Luciana (Kattia González) from their first drunken encounter in the city waiting for the bathroom during a costume party (Pedro dressed as a bear, Luciana as a schoolgirl: at first she’s not interested but then returns to where she left him) through a shared taxi ride in which they both agree (and high-five) on the best way to have a family. Luci says, “I think I could have kids if I could raise them with one person, but could still go on dates sometimes and it wasn’t an issue.”

Pedro, always the joker, then suggests, “Let’s have a kid together… you can go out on Fridays and I’ll go out on Saturdays.” When they discuss the advantages of sharing parenting with a queer couple, the cab driver (whom we don’t see: the choice of shots in the film is often quite shrewd–and its stills are beautiful enough to fill any coffee table book) cannot resist interrupting and berates them for not wanting the traditional family life that he and his wife have. Pedro and Luci don’t argue and resist rolling their eyes: we’ve seen they had to wait forever for this cab.

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The “trip” of the title is on a bus to a national park situated around a volcano, where Pedro has work studying biology for his graduate degree and a hungover Luciana (still in her costume, with no luggage other than her purse) has spontaneously agreed to accompany him. The film has a leisurely pace, especially once they are in the wilderness (in spite of its 70-minute length I found myself nodding off a couple of times) but its pleasures (the beauty of the Costa Rican landscape and the chemistry between Bolaños and González, whether their characters are about to have sex or are just shooting the shit) and surprises (this film might seem like loose, funny improvisation at first but by the end we see it’s cleverly scripted) are genuine ones that many will recognize from their own lives–and which rarely, if ever make it into the movies.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6xxvVuWra4″ iv_load_policy=”3″]

On Oct. 14 and Oct. 16,  Mill Valley Film Festival in California will be showing writer-director Laurie Kahn’s Love Between The Covers, a feminist, bad-ass, diverse documentary about the successful authors of romance novels. The women (most of whom attend romance novel conferences and other similar get-togethers shown in the film) talk about a “pay it forward” philosophy in which each explains how veteran writers helped her out at the beginning of her career and so she now helps writers who are just starting out.

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Every time I expected this film to let me down it proved me wrong. When I thought, “Oh, it’s going to be all straight women,” it included as one of its main players a queer writer, Radclyffe (Len Barot) a former surgeon who writes about queer women. When I thought the film would be all white women it included, again as part of its main focus, Beverly Jenkins, a Black woman whose novels feature Black protagonists. We also see other women of color and queer women in one-off scenes and interviews. And nearly everything the women tell us in this film is a revelation. As Jenkins says of the romance sector (which includes its legions of fans) “You have nothing like this in science fiction. You have nothing like this in fantasy. You have nothing like this in mysteries. We are the shit.”

For those of us who aren’t romance novel readers, the film is not only a pretty good case to reconsider, but also has Nora Roberts, a superstar of the genre (she employs at least two men in her immediate family as part of her empire) setting straight those who might dismiss romance novels as “formulaic.” She tells us most genres adhere to a formula, including mysteries: for a whodunnit, the author had better reveal who the murderer is at the end!

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Other genre fiction doesn’t get the flack romance novels do, namely because romance novel readership is nearly all women–and romance novel sales are what support more literary writing (which sell just a small fraction of books) in the publishing industry. As one author says, “We’re the ones who keep the lights on.” Another interviewee tells us it’s not unusual for a romance fan to read a book a day.

Although the writers are in the business of Happily Ever After (HEA) stories, they aren’t under the thumb of traditional gender roles and family life: more than one woman says that she started writing because of how bored and frustrated she was as a stay-at-home Mom. They also show no hesitation in cutting lose men who don’t respect their work: two of the authors (who also write together) divorced their husbands and then decided to move in (platonicly) together. We also see how hard the women work: in-demand authors are expected to write more than one full-length book (sometimes many more than one) a year, every year and they (or their assistants) are expected to engage with fans on their own websites, on social media and in person as well. Love Between the Covers is my favorite documentary of the year so far and could easily  turn out to be the best one I see in 2015. Go to the theatrical showings of these films while you have the chance.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwABHUXofhY” iv_load_policy=”3″]

 

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender