Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli makes formalist deconstructions of cinema in order to glean a feminist perspective on the role of the starlet and femme fatale that move beyond the female body to embrace the uncanny. For “Something is Happening” she will stage and direct a performative film shoot featuring the re-animation of the dead in order to explore a different uncanny body, the zombie.
Date: Dec 5, 2008Start Time: 3:30pm
Duration: 1 hour
Location: eucalyptus grove on library walk
Tags: Cinema, Dead, Deleuze, Image, movement, Perception, Re-animation, Time
One Comment
I am overcome with inquisitiveness and wonder with the sight of bodies strewn on the floor and curious onlookers taken by the spectacle of a film shoot. What is the scope of this moment? Does this event end at the camera lens, or does it extend further? What then is the camera? Is it itself a prop, a documenter, an actor, or a player? Are we witnessing theater? I ask because is not the whole world a stage? What of the young woman, the one in the white lab coat and pink hair peeking from under that wig? Is she herself a starlet, an auteur, or a sorceress? Where does she get her powers? Is it because she is the director that they heed her command, rising from the feign of death? Maybe it is because she is a filmmaker that she wishes to give movement to these images and because she is an artist that she finds meaning in this moment. Or is it because she is a woman that she can bring life into this world? Is it Deleuze? His name conjured, and I must surely confront him. What of the rush of sensation, as we bear witness to the unnatural, created by the artifice of set and scene moving through time? If he must be anywhere, then would it not be in the afterimage- the close-up of a face as it becomes animate during the incomplete process of a body becoming alive? Would he also say that we are now left with more than just bodies?
- Jerry Truong