MadCat Review

With a beautiful warm sunny day outside and Tenure filming around campus, the audience for the MadCat Women’s International Film Festival was miniscule, amounting to six in total. The curator, Ariella Ben-Dov, is probing the theme of identity and has chosen these seven films for their patient camera and lyrical imagery. Ben-Dov sees identity as personal and public, elusive and fixed. She provides a diverse grouping of films that in their assembled viewing become more common and less disparate despite their initial differences.

The opening film, The Widow’s Coast, showed water scenes of beauty and simplicity. Widow’s Coast traveled from Lithuania. Director Janina Lapinskaite presented a poetic portrait of widows: setting the table, putting lipstick on in readying to walk the dog—going through the motions. Women stand still as the haunting sounds of footsteps, the train whistles, lapping water and their voices, narrate their quiet lives of loss. One woman states, “God gave man everything but forgetfulness” as the camera moves from close ups on these women’s aged faces sitting quiet with their tea things at hand. One woman looks out a window, spotted with the tears of rain. Lapinskaite returns to one strange scene, shot from above, a woman sets a table for six and then later sits alone. Returning to the image, the spectator is forced to consider its strange placement and the mis-en-scene begins to take on the shape and colors of an underwater scene observed from above or in its angle a representation of the family of departed fishermen who watch over her.

The second film, The Market, come from Croatian director Ana Husman. It is a stop-motion homage to locally grown produce and the women who prepare the various preserves, relish and pickles that we observe along with the many other processes of the market in a disembodied form. The Market is a fast paced examination of the full day at any local market going from set up to clean up—the final image of garbage men removing the refuse leftover and hosing down the pavement.

The third film comes from Australian, Fiona McGee. She prevents a brief meditation and interview, concerning the attachment of young teenage girls and their mobile phones. Lost Without You is the appropriate title of this film, demonstrating the girls’ use of their mobiles as one would a security blanket. Many feel lost and alone without it. It is their connection to the outside world and their all-important network of friends. As the film ends, the phones lie on the girls' bedside table or under their pillow, they awake in the darkness to its neon call.

The fourth film, Benidorm, comes from Germany. Director Carolin Schmitz continues the water and aged theme seen in the previous films in her film about the elderly tourists who gather on the Benidorm beach of a small Spanish town in the Mediterranean during the off season. This documentary won the 2006 German Short Film Prize and is striking in the contrast between the beach side high-rises and the flat lands and gorgeous mountains in the background.

The fifth film is a minute long and comes from a series of animated interviews. This one illustrates a baby born with two heads and put in a jar. It is both sad and strangely humorous and in its brevity hints at a series of interest by Kyja Kristjansson-Nelson.

The sixth film is entitled, Miriam, Impression of Light. Miriam is an albino girl who along with her boyfriend discusses her identity as it relates to her unique appearance and experiences. As with the other films, there are scenes set at the beach and among the waves as a lone figure and a young woman playing with her boyfriend.

The seventh and final film comes from Austrian director Kathrin Resetarits. I Am Me explores the meaning off individuality in common and everyday routine. I Am Me emphasizes this observation and the importance of self by looking at twins—twin girls in particular.

The MadCat International Film Festival basically serves as a short sampler of intriguing films and female directors from around the globe. The tastes are varied and at times unsatisfying but at moments one savors the potential and the beauty in an image and a story.

Caramel

Caramel is the new film by Nadine Labaki who both directed and starred. This picture explores the socio-political persecution of females in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East. With this underlying thematic critique, it is also a film full of visual pleasure. The opening shot moves over solidified caramel, a rich golden brown as it cuts to manicured hands, the bubbling of sugar in a pan, and mouths tasting the sweet, supple confection.

The film follows five women, three young women who work at a beauty parlor, one middle aged woman, Jamale, who is a regular customer, and one older woman, Rose, who works as a tailor next door. Layale is having a secret affair with a married man. Nisrine is about to be married and is no longer a virgin. Rima is attracted to women. Jamale is worried about getting older as she seeks employment as an actress. Rose is the sole caretaker for her older mentally unbalanced sister, Lili.

The beauty parlor is a refuge for these women. It is a space for and operated by women. When any men do enter the parlor, it is either a great event or a hurried delivery. Even the broken sign over the entrance comes to symbolically embody these women and their shared lives. The name of the beauty parlor is Si Belle; however the B is hanging off the sign spelling the word, Si elle. So Beautiful becomes So She or If She depending on translation and evocative of the beauty of these women and the suspenseful anticipation of their desires. Labaki includes two scenes of the women locking up the beauty salon for the night, as if to remind the audience of its presence as a sanctuary during the day where the women are able to be their true selves, away from their night world of expectation and control.

Caramel is, at its heart, a love story. By love, I do not mean that which romantic comedies make light of, but rather love in the way it challenges, hurts, and ultimately makes us smile and sing. Caramel is the perfect title for this kind of exploration of love—a sticky sweet substance that when applied to the skin, shocks repeatedly upon removal. Caramel’s love is between sisters, friends, women, and men. Including young and old, love hovers near or is unspoken from afar. Love is haphazard in its translation.

The audience is invited to be friend and confident, sharing intimate moments and secrets. While the film is not perfect, it’s imperfections remind us of the characters own flaws.
The use of inter-cutting and other subtle phrasing suggests the deep symbolism of these women’s employment and their lives in Beirut. One sequence shows Rose hemming the suit of her suitor and Nisrine as she lays on the operating table to have her vagina sewn to return her virginity for the marriage bed.

Caramel is heartbreaking and hilarious. This duality is most subtly combined in the character of Lili and in the music of composer, Mouzanar The use of circular shapes and lighting within the mis-en-scene marks an exciting aesthetic that I have not seen before and highlights the human shape in the rectangular frame. Additionally, the closed blinds add to the sense of secrecy of the female world, hidden from the patriarchal gaze of the state. The eye candy is not bad either--I couldn't resist!

C-Stand

Introducing my supplemental blog!

C-Stand: What I See and Where I Stand

I'm mixing it up and pulling in my various activities. These include film sets, television, movies, music and art.
Enjoy!

Funari

So I just finished a "master class" with filmmaker Vicky Funari. She is the award-winning director of MAQUILAPOLIS, LIVE NUDE GIRLS UNITE!, and PAULINA--all documentaries. She showed clips from these three films which focused on Mexican and Peep show girl populations. Funari defines herself as a feminist and her work as feminist.


The most interesting film in her selection of clips was an experimental project of hers from 1994, SKINESTHESIA. Her own opinion of the work was quite low. She sees it as dated, but still bringing up issues that she had hoped would have changed in our cultural experience in the last fourteen years. SKINESTHESIA follows Hanna, a performance artist and peep show dancer. It is an eighteen minute film about her and her body and the use of the body in her different environments. Funari employs split screen images to draw further comparisons between the imagery of the peep show and her professional performance. The use of language and poetry in voice over form reminds me of experimental and dance film coming from Sarah A.O. Rosner and her company, the AO Movement Collective. This artist also has an interest in the scientific words of the body, sexuality, and poetry.

Toi, Rosetta. Moi, Mouchette

The connections between Rosetta (Dardenne 1999) and Mouchette (Bresson 1967) were intriguing in the presentation of similar themes and scenarios. Both girls have difficulty with social interactions. Both interact with drunks and belligerents and form emotional attachments to these people. Both are placed in the woods with different levels of agency. Their relationship with nature and society plays with their internal struggles.

Mouchette and Rosetta have defining scenes interacting with the opposite sex. These scenes and the connections that come out of them can be seen to define the trajectory of the film. Riquet is kind to Rosetta and feeds her and cares for her. Arsene does not do as much for Mouchette. In their intimate encounter he offers her a drink and later rapes.

Graham hinges on the immediacy of our involvement, “Rosetta is charged with a visceral energy that makes the act of viewing less a visual and emotional experience than a forceful physical sensation” (1). When the camera is following Rosetta through the woods, it stays close to her face. On occasion the camera stays stationary watching her before it follows her path across the highway and behind the gate. My stomach did flips similar to the sensations felt riding in a car going up and down hill.

The spectator experiences a physical connection to Rosetta. When she speaks to herself in a relatively calm scene, Morgan notes that she “sees herself as divided, as having to separate into two parts of a missing whole in order to giver herself the comfort she has not received and is not yet able to receive from another” (530). The spectator could be interpreted to be the “Tu” or other, she is addressing. In the audience’s divided identification with Rosetta, we are also lacking in wholeness. She is separate from us. We cannot come to her aid and seemingly should struggle to connect with an image projected on the screen.

Additionally, the Dardenne brothers are commenting on both the experience of Rosetta, her isolation and inability to connect with others, as well as the audience’s own use of film to exist in a dark isolated space. Rosetta is always exposed even in her ritual changing of shoes.

The elements of nature seem to ravage her body. When her mother pushes her into the muddy water and she is left alone calling for help, the spectator is as disconnected from her struggle as she is without aide. We cannot help her. This scene is closely tied to the experience of Mouchette who likewise falls into the water. Both young women seek suicide as their last resort; Mouchette succeeds.

Rosetta even in her betrayal of a friend does not lose her life in the end. She has forsaken her job to commit suicide upon the return of her mother, which is like an emotional suicide for her. However, Riquet comes to her aid in the final image, doing for her what she convinced herself to do for him when he was sinking in the river. This parallels the water scene; her fall onto the blue gas can is her suicide attempt. Unlike Mouchette, the audience has hope that this time around she will live and become whole in the audience’s departure from her life.