An exploration of the body and all its interiors, the body as form, geometry, subject and object. Featuring angels Velvet Lucifer and Daisy Love in a homage to 1920’s surrealism and the photography of Francesca Woodman, Hans Bellmer and Penny Slinger amongst others. Slip into a dream state and explore the unconscious mind ꩜
Lots of surrealists explored the figure of the doll or mannequin, Hans Bellmer’s mutated, broken, abstract doll sculptures were created as an antithesis to the rise of eugenic physical perfectionism ideal of 1930’s Germany.
This film is made in that spirit, pushing back against the idolisation of the body as a boundaried, immutable object to be sanitised and preserved. Not a doll to be put on a shelf and admired. The body - not as a temple - but a playground to be entered, spread, explored. Slippery openings, spit and flesh and hair. Playing in the mess. Limbs merging, breaching the boundaries of the internal. Entering each other, going where you shouldn’t, merging form.
The name of this film comes from the only book produced by the photographer Francesca Woodman before her death. In Woodman's self portraits photographs the body becomes a sculptural object, a symbol, a form and a portrait. She merges with walls, with mirrors, door frames. She twists around bowls of eels and cut fruit creating symbolic narrative relationships. She leaves traces of herself in dust and in blurred smears as the camera catches her half moving. A self in flux, ghostly, slippery and unable to be fixed or pinned.
Thinking about the body as containing interior geometries was the beginning of the genesis of this film. Form to be mapped and explored like Bellmer's gridded body part drawings.
The dream machine was created by Brion Gysin in 1958 as a way to access hallucinatory psychedelic experience through flickering / flashing lights seen through closed eyes and the pulsing, swinging lights in this film reference the hypnotic pull of Gysin’s machine. Each vision could be a snapshot of a dream state experience.
thinking about symbolism I'm just going to include some ideas here
130 Large.jpeg86.8 KB bitten fruit. Eve biting the apple, original sin, breaching the internal.
The tension of the vulnerability of flesh, how easily it's penetrated, broken or subverted, highlighting the thin boundary between the internal and external.
Seeing is a detached sense, tasting deeply intimate. Replacing the detached with the bodily intimate. Penny Slinger created Mouthpieces where unexpected body parts are collaged into open mouths. In Un Chien Andalou the exterior of the eye ball is infamously breeched with a razorblade.
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To make this film we had to lock ourselves in a blacked out room for a whole day of sticky, gloopy, ripping fun. We laughed as much as we fucked, slipping around the gloop of the nuru gel at the end like little foetuses emerging from the amniotic fluid.
