Female Filmmaker Project: Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940)

 I cannot speak objectively with movies about dance. There is no greater sense of joy than the intersection of music, plus cinema, plus movement. The moments where characters simply decide it's time to move and are accompanied by song stick with me like nothing else in all of filmmaking. The final frames of Beau Travail, Frances running through the streets to "Modern Love", Gene Kelley stomping through the rain, The Red Shoes: that's my cinema. So when Dance, Girl, Dance begins with eight lithe, graceful women in top hats, all moving symbiotically in frame to a jaunty tune I knew I'd love this movie, but it offered so much more than just dance.

It's ironic that a movie "dance" in it's title wouldn't be a traditional musical, but instead a comedic drama, but either way Arzner and Ernst Mantray have a resolute interest in capturing the beauty of movement. Arzner's blocking is incredible throughout and becomes especially significant whenever she is shooting the dancing sequences. Whether individualistic or in group movement her cinema becomes minimal and so defined by the shifting of legs, arms and hips when song begins. The action is completely linked to how they get around the room. The shadows fill out the picture, and the windows, chairs and mirrors give layering to how the dance takes up space. When Maureen O' Hara dances, as seen above, Arzner's lens accommodates her symphony by never over cutting or turning the entire event into directorial virtuosity. Instead Arzner humbly hands her camera over to O' Hara who simply moves. That's all the movie needs here.

Once again, Arzner sits back and let's O' Hara's movement dictate the emotional heft of the scene, as this time she begins to work as a stooge to Lucille Ball's more brash and anti-ballet burlesque performer "Bubbles" and in doing so is booed relentlessly.

She does the same for Lucille Ball's more playful sequences while never shaming her body or her decisions. This is important as it doesn't betray the film's final moments by throwing Lucille under the bus for O' Hara's character. Her image making is of equality. They just move for different reasons.

If this were just a film about a series of consecutive dance sequences I would still love it, but it far exceeds the confines of formal craftsmanship and digs into something much deeper when O' Hara longs to exist in show business. There's a sequence of images throughout that show O' Hara's base desire and sadness at not having what she wants. Seeing the angelic light on the dancer in the production she covets, the morningstar: the dream, the sadness at applying make-up for a job that doesn't give back. One woman scratching and clawing and climbing to survive with the help of only a few others and working as hard as she possibly can. That is the greatest humane quality of the picture. She never gives up, and this boils over in one stridently feminist and eye opening moment in the closing moments of the picture.

She gets a twinkle in her eye right before she decides to speak her mind. They've been tormenting her for months, and while she appreciates the kindness her friend offered her with this job has turned out to be a thankless one where she is depreciated night after night. But she always danced, because her tutor told her to in her dying breaths. She's had enough though, and the booing must stop. She lets go and finally lambasts the men for ogling women in a way they can't even their wives, she criticizes their enjoyment of haranguing a hard-working woman for a peek at titillation. She detests that they seek to commodify her body when she wants to be celebrated for it. She moves with grace, but she's treated like swine and for what reason? Because she doesn't take off her clothes. One woman stands and claps at the close of her speech. I wanted to join her.

Female Filmmaker Project: Tank Girl (Rachel Talalay, 1995)

Rachel Talalay wanted to make an action picture that was like nothing else currently on the market. She was fed up with the idea of female action heroes whose characteristics were identical to that of men, but transferred to a female body. She loved the Tank Girl comics and with it saw a chance to make good on that promise of a completely unique woman action hero with an adaptation of that text, and in some ways she completely succeeds, but the film as a whole suffers from some unfortunate pacing and narrative decisions that nearly undo an incredibly unique character.

The 1990s saw a birth of grrrl power and riot grrrl aesthetic that informs the type of character Tank Girl exists as. Part Wendy O. Williams and Mad Max with a riot grrrl mix tape in her walkman the titular character is a punk ideal while exhibiting the same underground comic aesthetic she was birthed from in the 1980s. To say the least she carries the entire world of her movie on her back, and the film lives and dies by her frequency on screen. Lori Petty perfectly encapsulates the kind of character Tank Girl needed to be and appropriately sets herself apart from every other woman character in the history of the comic book to film medium. Often, women characters are relegated to being love interests even in the best comic book adaptations (Spider-Man 2, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) , but this is Tank Girl and this is 100% her movie up until the narrative is blindsided by a handful of Kangaroo mutants (who are present in the comic) who I would lovingly refer to as Jar-Jar's by just how much they disrupt an otherwise good movie.

Tank Girl is at it's very best when it is loosely jamming many different parts of cinema (comic book animation, dance sequences, music video montage) together into a jumbled mess that fits the kind of thrown together look of the titular character. Riot Grrrl is an easy thing to come back to when discussing the form here, but the collage like nature of Tank Girl is reminiscent of zine culture that came out of Olympia, Washington in the early 1990s. Tank Girl's feminism is most present in how the main character carries herself, and as a production it's one of the few pictures of the time that seems actively influenced by the form of riot grrrl music and art. It's ironic then that Courtney Love was the mastermind behind the soundtrack as she always kept the genre at arm's length due to the limitations of the genre's Stepford quality in bands cannibalizing each other and none of them being able to stand apart, whether that be true or not is an entirely different issue. Sprinkled throughout the set design are even more remnants of that music's influence on the preceding's as "Lunachicks" stickers are taped all over Tank Girl's hideout. This all mirrors the look that Arianne Phillips put together for the lead as her ripped stockings, paint brush fingernails and goggles is a constructed look that exists totally for the inner self of Tank Girl and no one else. Her clothes don't really match, they don't fit perfectly and they are tattered, but it completely works, because really there are no rules as to what is or isn't an acceptable look, and if her clothing wasn't optimal it would betray the attitude Petty gives off in her performance. It's similar to another film I looked at earlier this year, Desperately Seeking Susan, where so much of the film's visual language comes from the fashion of Madonna. Both of these film's wouldn't work nearly as well if the clothing wasn't on point, but in both cases these characters became fashion icons in distinctly different ways.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Naomi Watts (Jet Girl) whose short time here accompanies Lori Petty's performance remarkably well. Watts is a side character but as a Velma to Daffney or even Jane to Daria she is absolutely perfect, and their friendship works so well because they're extremely different from one another, but end up banding together and bonding to survive through the post-apocalyptic wasteland  of Australia (also centered around water if you want to get back to Mad Max comparisons). Malcolm McDowell seems to be having fun as well as a tongue in cheek villain who literally would dissolve his henchmen into water and drink them on sight to intimidate his fellow employees.

Tank Girl cannot sustain it's eccentricities, energy and formal decision making throughout though, and as Talaly described, studio edits ran amok of her vision. I truly believe her, as the third act sees a detour into silliness that doesn't really feel tonally acceptable to the first two acts. Jet Girl and Tank Girl take a detour to stay with the rippers (The Jar-Jar's) for a while and the movie gets side tracked and slows to a crawl. The narrative leans further away from Tank Girl and Jet Girl and the movie loses complete grasp of pacing and trudges towards the credits until finally things are resolved and Tank Girl rides off into the sunset. Talalay also struggles with shooting competent action so the final third isn't in her forte of zingers, verbal comedy and music. As much as I dislike the last 30 minutes of the movie though the first 90 or so showcase something that Talalay truly wanted to make, and one that feels unabashadly 90s in a way that situates itself firmly in a time of third wave feminism. Today's comic book heroines could learn a thing or two about how Tank Girl carries herself......even though I'm pretty sure no studio would be willing to greenlight a superhero character who happens to be a woman, and give her this much freedom twenty years later, and knowing that regression makes me sad. It also makes me appreciate Tank Girl despite finding it heavily flawed, because there really isn't anyone else like her.

My Favourite Examples of Filmed Media of the Half Year: 2015

(this is a still from Jools Holland, not the 9:30 club, but you get the point)

Sleater-Kinney: Live at the 9:30 Club

The news of Sleater-Kinney's resurrection surfaced sometime in early October. There were rumblings of an unmarked single containing a new song being featured in their box set "Start Together" that set my corner of the internet abuzz. When those reports were signaled as true it was a cherry on top of what was the best birthday I had experienced in my entire life. I was looking at a cake that for the first time had my real name, I had a ribbon pinned to my chest that said "Birthday Girl", and there was a 5 second clip of a new Sleater-Kinney song on youtube. I couldn't have been happier at the prospects of new music from a band that felt less like a trio of musicians and more a reflection of something that apparated out of my soul. I knew that I'd never get the chance to see them live so I held onto any and all clips that surfaced on youtube, but then NPR announced they'd be streaming an entire show. This was going to be the closest I come to seeing this band that I love so dearly. I turned the lights off, put my headphones on and turned the volume up to unhealthy levels and wept at the first notes of "Price Tag". I wasn't there, but it felt like I was and when Corin Tucker lifted her hand out into the audience during "Gimme Love" and sang with the ferocity that made me fall in love with her I reached out too.

Dean Ambrose becomes WWE World Heavyweight Champion....sorta

1...2...3...and I jumped what felt like 10 feet. I squeeled and repeated over and over again he did it! he did it! I was lost in the moment of my guy conquering the man who betrayed him and as a consolation prize he was becoming world champion. Only the moment was taken away seconds later to my eventual cries of "what just happened? why did they do this?". Emotional Whiplash. Dean Ambrose pinned Seth Rollins in the middle of the ring clean, but before all this happened Seth pulled a referee in front of Ambrose as he hit a diving elbow. That referee was unconscious afterward so another ref came out to count the pinfall. When the unconscious ref awoke he threw the match out and ruled it a disqualification. Dean Ambrose had won, but it didn't count. My emotions did though, and the teasing of that moment was downright cruel, but Ambrose decided to take the belt anyway, and I can't blame him, because he did earn it in that specific moment. I rode the highs of Ambrose holding that belt for the next 2 weeks even though in the back of my mind I knew this was false. Dean Ambrose has been yanked and pulled around by WWE decision makers for the better part of 8 months now, and despite his organic ascent to becoming one of the most popular wrestlers in the company they refuse to give him much in the way of anything to celebrate. Even as I type this he has suddenly slid back into the middle of the card after a few weeks of flirting with the main event scene. It's brutal being a Dean Ambrose fan, and even this moment which made me fall back in love with WWE isn't exactly real. Dean Ambrose never became champion, but it felt like he did for about sixty seconds, and in that sixty seconds I felt a joy that can only be administered from professional wrestling. I've never leapt into the air at the close of a film. I did when I thought Dean Ambrose won.

Fury Road: Autuerism, Minimalism, Feminism

For all we've talked about the feminism or the bombastic over-saturated colour scheme we haven't discussed Fury Road's minimalism. This is a straight line. As soon as Furiosa heads east there are no divergences from that path. When she turns and goes outside of the course she has been set everything becomes a chase predestined towards forward momentum. We're heading home, to the green place, away from oppression. The movie never wavers from this thesis of lunging forward as Furiosa and her gang of women (plus Max and one Warboy) push through the dust and the dirt and the rocks towards an area of peace, but as soon as they get there they realize there is no serenity to be found in running away. So they double back on that straight line they traveled at the beginning of the movie and attempt to make peace with where they're from and create a heaven of their own, but they're still moving forward. They're just heading back. All the while Miller is riffing on the same action sequence that he introduced at the close of the first Mad Max, and through years of restructuring and building upon that forward momentum of a straight road stampede of engines he perfected his craft. It's even more astounding he did this in Hollywood where branding has been centralized over auteurism in years of late.

Madness and Magic: The Abstract in Adventure Time

When Adventure Time announces an episode featuring The Magic Man it always graces the creators of the show reason to become abstract and imaginative in a way that other episodes do not offer. Magic Man is a creature of pure chaos whose only limitations are his desires at the moment. With his magical power he can transfix any given scenario into something horrific, and here we finally see his backstory as well as the next chapter in Ice King's unraveling as Adventure Time's most sympathetic character. Magic cannot exist without madness in the land of Ooo and when you give yourself over to that power you lose control of yourself. Magic Man's hat, like Ice King's crown, is the origin of his destruction. He is not an evil man, but one being controlled by external forces. When his hat is removed later in the episode by Betty who had been working as Magic Man's assistant  she also becomes infected with magic, and she is now in the same boat as her former lover Simon (Ice King). If this all sounds convoluted it's because it is impossible to explain the complexities of Adventure Time's backstory as it goes far beyond the depth of most shows by consistently building upon narrative threads and characters, sometimes even seasons apart. What truly makes "You Forgot Your Floaties" a classic episode of the shows willingness to engage with the absurd. In a dream sequence Betty finds herself in a monochrome world of black and white (resembling a soulless Yellow Brick Road) before slowly being sucked into the mouth of a statue resembling Magic Man after she dons a mask of his deceased wife who is later revealed to be at the center of his need to meddle with magic. Monsters appear later, and they sift in and out of phases of dreamspace, meeting up with gods and rulers alike, until finally coming upon Ice King's muted voice speaking in severe close-up (in an homage to Robert Altman's 3 Women of all things) about the presence and core of magic. Betty takes that risk of madness to try to save Ice King when she steals magic man's hat. She already suffers under the effects as her eyes glaze over and her sense of self drowns in power. This is all setting up a later confrontation between Betty and Simon where they will likely confront their past and their future, and a storyline that Adventure Time has been playing with since the beginning of the show may finally come to a close. ,

Bitch Better Have My Money: Taking Back the Anti-Hero

Mikki Kendall (follow her on twitter, @Karnythia) tweeted shortly after the video for "Bitch Better Have My Money" dropped that Black Women hardly ever occupy the space of anti-hero outside of the music video space, and she's absolutely right. Only Pam Grier comes to mind when I think of the Black Woman Anti-Hero, but many more come to mind when asking the question of white women, and one would need to go no further than looking at last year's Amy Dunne from David Fincher's Gone Girl. It's appropriate to bring up Gone Girl, because the image of a woman caked in triumphant blood bookends both this video and the height of Amy Dunne's revenge. The image of a woman taking back what was hers by becoming violent can be a powerful image, and I think Rihanna's extreme close-up is one of the best single images in all of cinema this year. Rihanna shows a clear understanding of the types of influences that are sprinkled throughout Bitch Better Have My Money like Nicholas Winding Ref's penchant for neon coloured violence as seen in Only God Forgives, the seaside excess of something like Wolf of Wall Street or the Tarantino-esque still captures of characters like Mads Mikkelson's "The Bitch" as seen here. Rihanna refashions all these cinematic tools into a point blank statement that is only strengthened by her song's directness. It's totally cinema of her power, and what happens when you get in her way. It's anti-heroic, and it's also exhilarating. God only knows what else Rihanna might have in mind when it comes to movies, but if this is any indication she has the talent to take the world by storm.

Other Movies, Television Shows, Music Vidoes, etc that will stick with me
Michael Mann's "Blackhat"
Takashi Miike's "As the God's Will"
Sean Baker's "Tangerine"
Peter Strickland's "The Duke of Burgundy"
The Wachowski's "Sense8"
Bjork's "Stonemilker"
Grime's "Realiti"
Mad Men: "The Milk and Honey Route"
Penny Dreadful: "Fresh Hell"
Better Call Saul: "Marco"
NXT: "Sasha Banks vs. Becky Lynch" 
NXT: "Hideo Itami's Wrestlemania Experience"
"Wrestling Isn't Wrestling"

Existing: Transgender Representation in Sense8

It's easy to say representation doesn't matter when you have all of filmed media to choose from. White boys grow up knowing they can be anything and do anything, because film and television lets them know that they are the heroes and makers of their own stories. They can go out and achieve whatever dreams they want, because the entire world is at their grasp as long as they work hard or in some cases luck into it, but that isn't the case for everyone else. When characters on television and film represent some sort of cultural identity and definition, especially in the case of minority persons, the few characters that actually end up having their stories told become of utmost importance to those with little or no representation. It's even rarer when one of those characters is created by someone adjacent to the lived experiences of that minority character. More often those narratives and characters are constructed by the same white men who grew up wanting to be writers, and that isn't to say they cannot create great characters that aren't of their own lived experience, but it can be revelatory to see that character in the hands of someone who truly knows the ins and outs of a lived experience another person may only have tertiary knowledge of. In the case of Sense8, Lana Wachowski has given trans women a character so wholly different from the normal palette of transgender women in film and television that she feels like a springboard moment in what is hopefully more respectful and understood characterization of an often completely botched segment of people in film narratives.

The history of transgender female representation in movies and television is a constricted, damaging, limited, and completely toxic presentation of our lives with only a few bright spotlights throughout the last 100 or so years of movie making. Before the advent of Netflix's transgender duo (Nomi in Sense8 and Sophia in Orange is the New Black) there wasn't a significant role for transgender women where they could play a character who wanted to be more than a corpse (CSI, Dallas Buyer's Club) , a murderer (Dressed to Kill), a joke (Family Guy, Ace Ventura) or a sex worker whose life decisions were damned by whoever was writing the character (Law and Order). There wasn't an opportunity for us to exist beyond these confines so preconceived notions of who we are formulated in the minds of those without any direct relation to transgender people. It painted a portrait of a non-existent humanity, something (not someone) to be feared, mocked or pitied for having decided to become a deviant.

Even well meaning liberal motion pictures like TransAmerica and Dallas Buyer's Club reek of allyship and an understanding that our bodies are constructed through maleness, rough exterior, and a kind of damaged femininity that is more akin to clown make-up and dress-up rather than an internal sense of womanhood. In those pictures we cannot escape a body that came to being through an assumed male socialization, because in these pictures transgender women are not women, but men to be pitied for having taken on the guise of womanhood which is in and of itself a deeply misogynistic line of thought that completely undermines who we are, how we got to be, who we are, and how our bodies are structured. Notice how transgender women are almost always portrayed by cisgender men, because in the opinion of Hollywood there is no way we can achieve a body capable or close to the cisgender female beauty standard placed upon all women by society at large so instead of showing real transgender bodies Jared Leto, Jeffrey Tambor and Eddie Redmayne occupy our space and define our place as women through masculinity. When they do write transgender women as beautiful characters or love interests for men it's never enough to actually give them a happy ending and romance, but instead our bodies are upended by a reveal that categorizes us as male by focusing on a phallus. The man in the relationship has been tricked, and the entire relationship has been an affront to his sexuality. Take for instance the scene in Family Guy where characters vomit upon knowing they've slept with a transgender woman, only to have creator Seth MacFarlane say this is the natural reaction of men afterward. This both distances the narrative away from a transgender woman and focuses on a misogynistic, male viewpoint and a token punchline in a joke that our bodies are vessels of disgust. When dissecting that idea even further one finds that our humanity is then weighed on our attractiveness and our ability to please men, which goes beyond just a transmisogynistic idea of our standing in culture, but women as a whole, because if women's narratives in film or television are only there to be attached to the pleasures of one man then this is wish fulfillment instead of reality, and strips all women of anything resembling character, cis or trans.

This is obviously a problem, and becomes exhausting when looking for anything resembling direct text relating to transgender lifestyle. Personally, I have always looked for subtextual readings of motion pictures where I could find something genuinely relatable to my own life experiences. I wrote about this earlier this year when I analyzed Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin as a transgender narrative, and while that film means a monumental amount to me it's closeness towards transgender themes are something created by accident and completely in the realm of subtext. Girls like me don't exist in the pictures is something I used to say to myself. I'm a young woman, and I look like these girls on the screen, but they don't have my dysphoria or the problems present in my life. I didn't find a single relatable character to my own personal existence until I watched Paris is Burning and found a closeness with Venus Xtravaganza who wanted nothing more than to live a normal life, and make her body complete in her eyes by having vaginoplasty, but in the final moments of the movie her body is disposed of, cutting short a life that was in it's earliest chapters and extinguishing the chance she had at feeling home in her own skin some day. It's devastating, it's documented, and it's real. I was left aghast at the brutality of the world, and wondered if I'd ever make promise on completing my own body or if someone would take that chance from me someday. It's uncertain, because we aren't safe even 25 years later. Paris is Burning is the greatest piece of transgender art that has ever been created, because it offers a glimpse into the lifestyle, bodies and humanity we have to offer this world. We are completely driven by the same desires and goal oriented ideas about career-making, family and creating a lasting effect on this world that all humans are even if our time is shorter. I fully believe we can change the ideas presented about our worth of life, and in the last few years there have been significant strides in the mainstream media regarding our lives, but things still have an exceedingly long way to go, but the trickle effect of gaining agency on our own narratives is beginning.

I'm forever grateful of what netflix is allowing to happen on their network, because they've finally given me a mirror in a fictional narrative of someone who I can finally say is like myself. When Nomi is introduced on Sense8 she's having sex, her body is there for the entire world to see, and it's not sorrowful to gaze upon her flesh, because it's like mine. It belongs to a woman, not a man acting. Her sexuality is treated as belonging to her, and it's her orgasm that the show is intent on capturing. This is agency, and the reveal of her girlfriend using a dildo on her afterward presents this as a narrative that won't end with her feeling betrayed at knowing her body completely, because she loves every inch of her. They embrace, and their queerness is beloved by this show. Their warmth goes beyond the bedroom as well, and in a later scene at a pride gathering Nomi is confronted by a trans exclusionary radical feminist who refers to her as a colonizing male. This visibly upsets Nomi, but something remarkable happens just moments later when her girlfriend defends her place as a woman and in the LGBTQ community. Nomi is crying and then simply says to her girlfriend "No one has ever defended me before". That is love. I know it because, the same thing happened to me just 24 hours earlier to me when my boyfriend called out some people for using the word "Tranny" when I was visibly upset by it. The parallel example of these two things happening alongside one another really hit home that this is my show. This is the truth. This is made for me and not for cisgender people. Nomi belongs to people like me, and after 23 years of existence I have someone. I guess girls like me do exist in the movies after all.

Female Filmmaker Project: SuperDyke (Barbara Hammer, 1975)

If Themyscria is a supposed feminine ideal and a place of paradise for Amazonian Women in Wonder Woman then Barbara Hammer's movies seek out to create Themyscria for lesbians within her cinema. SuperDyke specifically works as a document to a very specific time in queer rights where the mainstream was just starting to get wind of queerness and a post-Stonewall, Second Wave centrism on lesbian feminist identity was becoming more pronounced. The idea of SuperDyke extends beyond the political though as Hammer's lens once again finds its greatest meaning in the personal, quieter moments of sexuality instead of the more on the nose examples of women kissing in front of a bus with words like "Lesbian Express" scrawled across the front. Those moments, however, are not brought down by the superiority of Hammer's more sensual, individual eye as they remain fun, tongue in cheek and at the time radical because of their intention of taking the queer space and extending it into the public eye. Another fun moment which calls back to it's comic book title is a scene where two women kiss in a phone booth, don vibrant yellow tank tops which say "SuperDyke", and step out into the open. The image is both interesting for it's cute call-back to the Amazon signs at the beginning of the picture to represent a Wonder Woman, as well as being a lesbian version of Clark Kent to Superman, and the political context of it meaning a coming out of the closet.

Hammer keeps the filmmaking interesting as well, and it'd have been easy for her to go back to the quick cutting and dissolve heavy imagery of her previous shorts Dyketactics and Menses, but here she goes for home video, with fleeting moments of interaction between her lesbian superwomen to create a portrait of life, love, happiness, and rightful personhood. The film is structured into a few sections, "On the Street", "In the Home", "In the Court", "At Macy's". Each representing a facet of life as seen through the eyes of her filmic figures. In the House is the most impressive as Hammer focuses on the foreplay of two women in a way that calls back to the way she shot sex in Dyketactics, but without the aggressive abstraction of constant dissolves. Here, she focuses on the smaller moments of sex, like the rubbing of shoulders, the look in another woman's eye when being in a complete state of effervescence, and the thrill of existing within one another. In that moment queer cinema never feels more present and alive. Away from the tragedy of Hollywood martrydom, and fetishization of the unknown, queer cinema lives and breathes in Barbara Hammer's worldview, and it's beautiful.

Female Filmmaker Project: Menses (Barbara Hammer, 1974)

There's this Heavens to Betsy song that surfaced out of the riot grrrl movement entitled My Red Self , it's an angry anthem about how menstruation is treated as something to cover up and hide by society at large. In that song Corin Tucker would sing "So you make me hide the truth from you" and it's a direct attack on how a normal bodily function is treated as something to shield away and how unfair that is to those who menstruate. That song was recorded in 1993, nearly twenty years after Barbara Hammer made a short film with the same intentions. It's embarrassing that nothing had changed in nearly twenty years. Second wave feminism led into third wave feminism, and today things are very much still the same. Only a few days ago Canada lifted their taxes on menstruation hygiene products, much to the chagrin of men who felt the tax should have stayed in place, even though the taxing of such products is ridiculous when if anything it should be a human right to have those products. Even then it's been 41 years and nearly nothing has happened to de-shame menstruation cycles so Barbara Hammer's, Menses still feels very relevant.

In style Menses feels connected to her previous feature Dyketactics, but her intentions are much more blunt this time, and instead of creating something sensuous and graceful in motion Menses prods at viewers aggressively. She still uses the dissolve technique and the nudity of women is present in almost every frame, but otherwise the sunny, warm textures of Dyketactics are replaced with dark reds that fill up the frame and in one case, at the close completely fill up the frame in a mural of women connected through a menstrual cycle. Menses is at its strongest when dissecting the notions of period blood as horror and turning it into a badge. In one frame a woman exists as a sanitary napkin completely covered with blood gushing out of her and staining the napkin before she rolls down a hill, and in another a woman stands before a white towel before droplets begin to form underneath her. She then takes the towel and drapes it around herself. This is a part of her, and not something she should be ashamed of, and that's the general message of Menses whether it be conveyed through the dismantling of a Kotex box or through a blood mural in the final frames.

Barbara Hammer week at Curtsies and Hand Grenades continues tomorrow with Superdyke. 

Female Filmmaker Project: Dyketactics (Barbara Hammer, 1974)

Dyketactics: tactile cinema by way of lesbian expression and complete reclamation of the body in the face of a longstanding history of male gaze upon women's bodies and the fetishization of queer women's sexuality. Notice how Hammer subverts the idea of nudity in imagery throughout art in her insistence to show the vagina in extreme close up instead of the more male associated fixation on breasts. As Hammer would recall in this interview with BOMB magazine, at one screening for Dyketactics in the 70s a man screamed at the close of the movie upon being shown a vagina to which the women in the audience replied "Haven't you seen one before?". One can infer that he had not been this close and personal before seeing Hammer's short, and there in lies the power of the image. The meaning of saying "This is my body, and it is not for your consumption or your sexualization, but instead it is my reality". This also supports the theory that this is not cinema made for men, but with it's everflowing love towards lesbian sexuality and the female body it would reject all things male, and it does. The recurring image of the camera in the hands of women taking pictures of their own bodies is another example of the control in which women have here, and the lens being shown focused specifically on genitals and breasts shows a specificity towards taking control of parts of women's bodies that men otherwise seek to control (breasts through the male gaze, and genitals through reproductive lawmaking).

Dissolves are the most consistent cinematic technique on display here with images surging in and out of one another with an ease and grace that is only empowered by the insistence upon showing fleeting moments of touch. A foot glides up against a calf, a hand runs through a blade of grass, a mouth clasps over areola, and everyone is nude or in an embrace through all of this. Hammer drops all semblance of the dissolve in the final minute and instead shows two women in the process of having sex. Her camera glides through the sweeping curves of their bodies and slides around limbs and crevices of flesh. Closing on an image of two women wrapped up together as close as they can possibly be, symbiotic, as one.



Barbara Hammer week at Curtsies and Hand Grenades will continue tomorrow with a look at Menses.

You can watch Dyketactics on Vimeo here
https://vimeo.com/101192467