It was in black and white, except for the flashbacks, which were in color. Maybe colorized. An American pilot crash-landed in a wet field outside a French village and was taken in by a family whose daughter, the pilot came to suspect, was a Nazi collaborator. She was beautiful, and not in a movie actress way, and I remember thinking that maybe this was an Italian neorealist film, but it didn’t make sense that it was set in France and that the dialog was in English. There was a dog with a limp, I remember, that was poisoned and that died terribly and melodramatically, clawing at its own stomach, and that’s when the pilot began to suspect that the daughter was on the Nazi side, and that she had murdered the dog—her own dog from childhood—to prove her allegiance to the Reich somehow.

There was a castle-like factory, I think, not far from the farm house that sheltered the American pilot, and that’s where he and the girl went to have long, philosophical conversations (the French girl speaking English in a beautiful, broken, menacing way that suggested she knew English better than she was leading on), conversations that inevitably turned into Production Code-era love-making scenes that were interrupted by machine-gun fire or the breaking of dawn. That’s when the flashbacks happened, for some reason, at dawn, as the factory engines began to ramp up for the day (it was a secret factory where bullets were manufactured for the French Resistance, although I can’t remember how the film conveyed this). In the first flashback, Total War switched suddenly to color, and it wasn’t a nostalgic flashback like you’d expect, but a bloody one that showed the slow, methodical slaughter of a pig by two men whose faces were obscured on a farm from what appeared to be the American pilot’s childhood memory, although why his dreams were presented in color in the film was never clear. (One suspected that the filmmakers were secret experimentalists or avant-gardists subverting the war-movie genre from within.)

Then the dream switched without warning to something very simple, so simple as to be terrifying. An open meadow bathed in orange sun, a blue sky, the meadow-grass and wildflowers moving in the wind, and a man on a black horse slowly crossing the meadow from screen left to right, the camera stationary. One thing that’s always bothered me about that scene: it was silent except for what appeared to be a gunshot. At least that’s what I remember from that night, watching the film that no one else wanted to see because it wasn’t by David Lynch. The gunshot. But no corresponding action in the scene. Neither the horse nor the horseman reacted to the sound, as if it was meant only for the audience, some sort of secret signal from the filmmakers to us.

After this, the film fell back into the expected patterns: the American pilot, on the mend, began to suspect with more confidence that the girl was a Nazi sympathizer; he lied and told her that he was Jewish in hopes of catching a reaction from her, and that his presence at the farm endangered her family; the girl went out for a walk in the woods in the middle of night, unaware that the pilot watched her from the window of his room. Just then a shot rang out in the forest and, although the pilot’s first thought was that this was a trap, and that perhaps the girl had indeed seen him watching from the window, he pulled on his wool coat and dashed out into the cool night. For the next several minutes, the film went black. Instead of images, there was nothing except the sound of the pilot running blind through the night, his labored breathing, his footsteps across the field, the call of an owl. Twice the pilot called out the girl’s name breathlessly as he ran, until another shot rang out, and the moon cleared from behind the clouds. There at his feet was a young man in a torn soldier’s uniform that appeared to be German, although it as hard to tell in the dark, and the uniform from what I could tell wasn’t even World War II era. The soldier grasped his throat, obviously dying from gunshot wounds. The pilot leaned down to listen to the man’s dying words, in the moonlight.

“She can’t . . .” said the German soldier before breathing his last in a gurgling whisper. Before the meaning of this settled in, the screen grew brighter, in flickers, and the pilot look back over his shoulder to see—in a point-of-view shot—a fire in the distance. He took off running back to the farm, and within a few seconds it became clear that all was lost. By the time he arrived the farm house was engulfed in flames and the pilot fell to his knees and slumped forward. Then something very strange happened: the film switched to color again, but not because it was a dream or flashback. Bathed in the yellow light of the fire, the pilot remained hunched forward in sorrow and despair as a shadow—the shadow of a human being—emerged from frame right.

It was the girl, in color, wearing a bright red beret. For the first time you could see that her eyes were blue. She kneeled down beside the pilot and put her hand beneath his chin and gently lifted his face toward hers. By this time the color had become almost psychedelically saturated, with both the girl and the pilot bathed in the hellish, red light and black leaping shadows from the fire. The camera slowly panned down, revealing her clenched fist, which she slowly opened, palm up. In her hand she held a small, silver swastika, which gleamed in the light. It seemed to move imprecisely in the palm of her hand, as if animated. Then film switched again back to black and white, and the familiar Hollywood music began, signaling the end. The camera slowly panned back up to pilot’s face, which wore an expression of agony or ecstasy. After holding there for a moment, the camera continued panning up to the sky, revealing the moon, partially obscured by the black smoke from the smoldering farm house.

At the time, I thought the ending was clear: the girl had torn the swastika from the uniform of the German soldier she had shot in the woods. She was a double agent, working for the Resistance, and murdered the German before he had a chance to sneak into the farm house to murder the pilot. But later, as I thought more about the film (which I only watched that once) I wondered if the swastika might have been the girl’s confession, an affirmation of what the pilot had suspected: that she was a Nazi and worse yet, a Nazi out of choice, not coercion. There was also the fact of the burning farm house, which seemed to me symbolic of the irrational terror of total war. But back then we found symbols in everything. Afterwards, I tried to explain the film to my friends, but the more I talked about it the more confused it became in my mind. I’ve never really searched for the film. I have no desire to see it again. In a way, it was the most horrifying film I’ve ever watched, and I watched it alone.

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The Artist’s title character is the fictional silent film great, George Valentin, played with Gene Kelly suave by Jean Dujardin, a debonair silent film actor with a monsieur moustache and a gift for animated facial expressions. The Artist opens with a long shot of a packed movie theater—creating a sort of “mirror in a mirror forever” feeling—and the opening of George’s latest and greatest silent movie. When it ends, George prances onto the stage and both the real and fictional audiences are delighted with several minutes of Valentin hamming it up with his terrier sidekick, much to the chagrin of his co-star who can’t get her 15 seconds in the spotlight. Aspiring actress Peppy Miller, played with vaudevillian humor by Berenice Bejo, bumbles into Valentin at the press event following the opening and—voila—a presumably fated match is made. Far from intimidated or embarrassed, the indomitable Peppy makes the most of her encounter, grabs Valentin’s arm and mugs for the cameras. Following an initial and enduring spark between the two, we watch Peppy’s acting career climb while Valentin’s wanes as he scoffs at the rise of “talkies,” vowing to remain committed to the silent genre. More than that, he challenges his ex-studio to an ideological duel by swearing to make a silent movie that will be better than any talkie they could ever make.

And so he proceeds to make a silent movie that in no way innovates or improves upon the genre. Rather than giving the talkies a go with his tail temporarily between his legs, he decides instead to sink himself into a multi-year bender. In the meantime, Peppy has become Hollywood’s darling on par with Meg Ryan circa before her face changed. As Valentin loses it all, plucky Peppy makes a bundle, keeps her self-respect and wherewithal, and, still carrying a torch, secretly acts as Valentin’s guardian angel. And so it goes throughout the rest of The Artist; Peppy and George meet occasionally, rekindle their spark, George retreats back into his stupor, Peppy does something helpful for him, eventually a near tragedy happens, and the movie ends with a surprise.

Though the character arcs of the film are formulaic and lack complexity, The Artist can’t be faulted for any of its actor’s performances. Both Dujardin and Bejo are charming, and each plays their character with effervescence and wit. An early scene where Bejo does a spot-on, Keaton-esque bit with Valentin’s coat is one of the best in the movie and Dujardin’s gift of elastic eyebrows produces some belly laugh moments throughout. The failing of The Artist is in its execution. Making an homage to the silent era in 2011 is an incredible opportunity to recreate the magic of the 1920s experience for contemporary audiences, or to take the tropes of silent film masterpieces and innovate or improve upon them. The Artist does neither. Instead, it banks on the perceived value of having a simultaneously nostalgic and novel experience of seeing a “silent movie.” It relies heavily on “likeability” gimmicks, cinematography clichés, and over-baked tricks. What better way to communicate a descent into semi-madness than with a shot of a drunken Valentin gazing Narcissus-style into his own reflection at his glass-topped kitchen table? Why not skew the camera angle a little bit so that the audience can’t tell which is the “real” George? Or how about randomly adding the sounds of cacophonous gibberish in order to foreshadow the coming age of talking movies? It’s like the auditory equivalent of the “girl in red” from Schindler’s List.  Once you imagine the characters speaking, it becomes apparent that, despite the pretense of ingenuity, The Artist is actually a fairly standard rom-com in content.

Much like its lead character, who to his own detriment swears off the future in favor of a pale imitation of former greatness, The Artist flatly conjures up vague memories of an exciting and wondrous time in film history for modern day audiences who can’t get enough of anything that reminds us of better, more sparkly times. George Valentin stuck to his pride and to his fear, not to some deep ideological, artistic authenticity. The Artist’s title and execution make you wonder what exactly, if anything, it’s trying to say about artistic integrity and enterprise. Have we really gotten to a place as a society where pretty, but largely empty, nostalgic endeavors qualify as artistry and go down in the books as “classics?”

Despite its Golden Globe and all of the Oscar buzz, The Artist isn’t actually a “great” film that warrants a reputation as an “immediate classic.” While it may feel like an innovative breath of fresh air by today’s standards, it doesn’t really push any envelopes. Perhaps that says more about what we’ve come to accept as innovation and artistic vision than it does about the quality of The Artist’s execution. It is, however, a really fun movie that makes us feel a little better and reminds us that every era has its ups and downs. Given the current state of national and global affairs, that sort of respite is in and of itself valuable. But in some ways, and likely unintentionally, it also reminds us that trying to relive better times will only get you stuck in a fog of self-pity, tripping balls on cheap whisky at a glass table ripe for cheap metaphors. So you better take a tip from the proverbial Peppy Miller and pick yourself up, look life in the eyes, and dance forward into the unknown.

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Bell currently lives in Amsterdam and speaks at film festivals, porn festivals, and feminist porn festivals. Her life is full of the dualities of life, parenthood, marriage, career. She has a toddler and has been searching for preschools recently. Several years ago she set up her own production company, Blue Artichoke Films, to make and distribute the movies she wanted to see. Now she’s working on a series of three interlinked films and is just finishing a documentary in which she followed a woman embracing her submissive side around Amsterdam for three years. We spoke about film theory, porn, sex and ethics.

***

The Rumpus: How did you become a filmmaker?

Jennifer Lyon Bell: I’ve always wanted to make erotic films. I’d seen porn when I was younger and I had thought that it was really ridiculous and nowhere near as sexy as the fooling around my friends and I were doing. So when I was a teenager, I thought it would be neat to do something better. Only I went off to college, to Harvard, and it didn’t really occur to me that that was a legitimate career option. I was into sex-positive feminism, reading Susie Bright and Carole Queen, but I didn’t really consider that erotic film was something I could do. Instead I went into advertising and had a career there for ten years.

Rumpus: So what changed?

Bell: I moved to Europe with my boyfriend and thought it might be time. I’d talked about making erotic films to everyone, friends and family and strangers on the street. In Amsterdam I decided to get a masters in film theory just to study erotic film and come up with a template for why I believe film is sexy. Is it just a matter of showing body parts or is there more to it than that?

Rumpus: A few years ago the New York Times did an article I think in the Sunday Arts and Leisure section about someone trying to make porn films for women. It was all about the Prada shoes, like if you get the fashion aspirational enough, women will be turned on. But that did nothing to change porn or the tropes, say, of what is sexy, which is what you’re trying to do. We’re conditioned to see porn in a certain way and you’re trying to subvert what that is.

Bell: It’s true. We’ve created a separation between sex and the rest of life that’s unnatural, so I want make films that bridge the explicit sexuality in, let’s call it, porn with the artistic expression and emotions and plot lines you’d see in art films. It’s not just a way to make interesting film but is a metaphor for what’s compelling about sexuality. It’s part of life, so acting like it’s some kind of separate ghettoized experience that we need to hide and not discuss is silly.

Rumpus: How did grad school help? What did you do there?

Bell: Specifically I was thinking, does having character and narrative make you feel more erotically charged by a film and if so why? There I had a framework to understand why I believe making something sexy isn’t just about showing body parts, and I stumbled on cognitive film theory, which talks about why everyone – not just women but men and women – feel what they do when they look at the screen. I became interested in sympathy and empathy.

Rumpus: Do they relate to that weird truism you hear spouted off about women and erotic material, that women need character development and narrative and men need visual stimulation? Is that even true?

Bell: I don’t believe men and women are terribly different when it comes to looking at erotic materials and getting aroused. Culturally we act like women need to have a huge complicated story to feel connected to a sexual relationship, but I don’t think that’s true. Plenty of films that don’t have much character I find arousing. Still there’s a basic statement a film can make that enables you as a viewer to become much more engaged. Having sympathy and empathy means you get more turned on.

Rumpus: So, obviously we’re talking something more involved than just tits and dicks, say. More than just anonymous consumer porn.

Bell: Yeah, the statement a movie can make is that these are basically decent people. These are moral people, and that sounds funny to talk about morality when you’re talking porn, but for all kinds of film, porn included, being engaged with the story and its characters involves you in their choices and actions and how you ought to feel about them. One way of talking about it is it boils down to morality. Is what they’re doing good or not? And, when people are basically good, you feel bonded with them and you want to feel what they feel. Use that in an erotic move and we can really get into the action. You can create that bond in an erotic documentary with real people’s stories and personalities and showing what they’re actually like and that they’re basically good people. Or, you can do it with fictional characters. Watching them struggle with their morality makes it more interesting and enhances that erotic bond you have with them.

Rumpus: Which you’re doing now in a bondage documentary, right?

Bell: Yeah, it doesn’t have a title yet, but I’ve been following the main character Lotus around for three years. It’s the true-life coming-out story of a submissive discovering her BDSM side in Amsterdam. She approached me because she’d seen the other films and wanted me to film her life as she went through this. It took her a while to convince me. I didn’t think she was serious but was just being flattering. We just shot the final scene recently and she’s happy with how everything turned out.

Rumpus: How is stuff for Lotus now? What’s her life like?

Bell: It’s changed so much. She’s much more sure of herself.  Before she questioned herself and wasn’t as happy in her love relationship. Now she’s in a satisfying one with a man who she’s been with for quite a while. That happened during the filming, and she’s had fantastic BDSM experiences that have made her more happy and has this boyfriend who loves and supports her. The movie’s message matches up with my personal belief in sexuality, which is that only when you feel safe enough to be honest with yourself, with what really turns you on and what you really want in your heart of hearts that you can live your life to the fullest.

Rumpus: As we’ve talked about morality and character that’s made me think of Russell Banks new novel Lost Memory Of Skin about a kid committed for a sex crime. Basically he’s a porn addict, and it’s beautiful, very sensitively written. Banks gives him humanity and depth. As you were talking about a moral sense, it made me think of the Kid (which is what he’s called in the book). He’d been a consumer of internet porn and there was no human aspect to it, just a consumption-addiction driven thing where he was inured to porn. In a way the book was about how and why he couldn’t be open to something slower and deeper and more emotionally driven. It was partly about the larger culture of how that happens, that deadening.

Bell: We contribute to a culture where the only ways of engaging are turned on or not turned on – orgasming or not orgasming, as if it’s binary. Being aroused can have a very different flavor based on what kind of film you’re watching or what kind of situation you’re in and they’re not all the same. Arousal is not all the same. Some people maybe want to have the option of a really quick, not very involved orgasm sometimes. That’s okay, but I think it’s on a broader psychological and philosophical level it’s important to say, there’s arousal that’s more fulfilling for you if you want to find it.

Rumpus: So how does that actually come into your movies?

Bell: My first film Headshot – it’s a remake of a classic Andy Warhol movie from 1964 – and in the original, Warhol detaches the viewer from the image by never letting you see who’s giving the blowjob. You get no sense of the relationship between the two people. And, it’s a silent movie, which also goes a long way towards distancing you. I thought, wow, wouldn’t it be cool to do the same thing and bring in the emotions that come from sound and from seeing the relationship. I remade it with a man and a woman, and you still never see the person who’s giving the blowjob but I tried to bring out his personality.

Rumpus: You get a really quick sense in it that he’s totally up for this, a bit charged by on-screen sex with someone he’s never met, but also that she is too.

Bell: When he and this woman meet each other, it doesn’t take long for you to understand what’s exciting to both of them in this situation, so you’re invested in their having a great time for a couple of minutes because that’s all it takes.

Rumpus: How did you find him? He seems so very dude, like kind of some ur notion of male up-for-it guy?

Bell: At the cast party for Matinee, one of the crew members said he’d like to be in a film for me, and I immediately thought of Headshot. He had no experience at all. He was just a regular guy who wanted to explore his sexuality on film, so when I had the idea he was the first person I called.

Rumpus: How did Matinee work?

Bell: It’s a story of a couple portraying lovers in a play  in Amsterdam and the woman, Mariah, struggles with whether or not to actually have sex on stage with her partner on stage. The play is a struggle and she wants it to be a success. It’s very much her, Mariah’s, story. I want people to be into her and invested in this boundary she decides to overcome. She doesn’t let him know what she’s decided to do, so when it comes to her making this move and having sex with him, you’re completely into it, and you want her to have a good time.

Rumpus: Your movie Skin Like Sun has no dialogue or story, so how do we invest in the characters there?

Bell: It was commissioned for a feminist porn festival, and I made it with Mureille Scherre, who’s also a DJ and lingerie designer. We wanted to bring to life the female character’s experience. One way we could do that was taking a lot of shots that represent how she feels in sex. Those are likely to be shots you won’t see in straight porn since it’s oriented towards men. We tried to take close-ups of when she’s touching his hair and ears and meld that all together so it feels like one continuous experience and you feel their relationship in a broader, closer way. The most important decision was to make it feel like real time. We wondered if it would make us feel closer as viewers to her experience.

Rumpus: The movie has a sweetness to it in all the touching and affection. Those are the telling details that make it clear they love each other. Somewhere I read that in looking at erotic images men are more likely to look at faces first, then genitals, which I thought was interesting and unexpected.

Bell: If you’re looking to understand how someone feels in a certain situation, the look on their face tells you a tremendous amount that can make you feel connected to that person. In traditional porn, men’s faces are largely absent. We see the woman’s face and body and genitals but we don’t see much of his body, and we definitely don’t see his face. But I want to. I miss it. In moments where characters go through a change where they get much more aroused I don’t want to be looking at their body parts but the reaction in their faces.

Rumpus: What movies inspire you?

Bell: Larry Clark’s films, hands down. He has a real feel for how complicated sex can be and that there are different kinds of arousal that being anxious or nervous and how those negative emotions can play in an erotic way. I really love how he has focused on that and made it the emotional centerpiece of his work, showing how sex is so much more than intercourse. He’s particularly interested in adolescents because at that age we don’t have words yet for everything we’re going through, and that makes it a really volatile and exciting time. I’m interested in those same phenomena for people of all ages. Sex is much more complicated and dynamic and electric than it looks on film. I also love Lars von Trier’s movies and how they show people pushing their own boundaries. I love the idea of incorporating that electricity of boundary pushing into my erotic filmmaking. I’d like to think everyone who’s worked on my films has a positive experience. I’ve never had anyone have a nervous breakdown like Bjork was reported to on his, but I respect that he’s not making a simple easy film. He’s throwing his whole self into making it and he expects his actors to do the same.

Rumpus: So how do you balance being married and having a kid, with making sexy movies? You don’t look or act like you have a dual life.

Bell: People always say to me, ‘You don’t look like someone who makes erotic films. I expected someone to be wearing a leather outfit or a vinyl bustier,’ but that taps into what I really want to be saying about sex. There aren’t sex people and non-sex people. Sex is part of everybody’s life and that you can be incredibly sexual and wear a flowered dress. Also making a film of any kind puts you in a vulnerable position. Well, I feel vulnerable making erotic movies because they have to be sexy to me. Each one is like saying this is what I personally find sexy. That’s scary for me even now.

Rumpus: Yeah, I was a stripper but don’t want to write about it in my fiction because I’m uncomfortable with people thinking that was/is/could be me. And, I don’t really like talking about my own sexuality partly because I have a hard enough time not judging myself for it. So, how have you gone beyond that?

Bell: I spend a lot of time managing my boundaries. I need to feel free and comfortable working with my actors and writing my scripts and doing the things that I need to do to make a movie that’s moving and exciting to me. I often spend months building up relationships with the actors. On set there are also all these fine gradations that I’ve learned to manage where someone says, well, how do you feel about – anal sex, say? Or, if someone says, how do you feel about sex doggie-style? I have to be careful to separate out my feelings about whether doggie-style sex makes sense in this film from how I feel about it in all erotic films and how I personally feel in my own bedroom. It’s a balancing act that can come down to a pronoun or else talking to fewer people at one time. Everyone on set has a different comfort level but I have to be able to talk about sex bluntly, and I have to respect my partner’s privacy too. Like, he may or may not want me talking about sex in a way that exposes him and his feelings.

Rumpus: Respecting a partner is one thing but you have a daughter? Wait, I didn’t mean that to sound like I’m shocked. At some point you’re going to have to have a discussion with her though.

Bell: I feel really lucky to have the opportunity to practice what I preach and raise a daughter who’s sex positive. I think I make the kind of films that I’m proud to stand behind. I think they say something good about sex and the way sex really is, and I hope to raise her with open and body-positive attitudes and to talk when the time is right about what I do and she’ll appreciate that.

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That night in Venice, Wenders told us, was an experience his brain could not comprehend but that his body most certainly understood. It’s not hard to imagine, given the abstract tendencies of contemporary dance, what such a visceral, emotional experience feels like, but it is hard to convey through a screen, as Wenders immediately wanted to do. It was only twenty years after this revelatory moment, at a screening of U2 3D, that a solution presented itself.

More than Cave of Forgotten Dreams even, Pina is a groundbreaking moment in 3D filmmaking. Both movies document experiences or locations that would have been visually and emotionally flattened in 2D. But Cave of Forgotten Dreams has only selected scenes where the power of 3D comes to the fore (the albino alligators at the end and the weirdo rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” would be just as inexplicable in 20 dimensions). Pina, meanwhile, is made up almost entirely of dance performances, a series of visual spectacles that continuously display 3D’s grand possibilities.

Bausch’s work is preoccupied with themes of loneliness and fraught human relationships, both of which are very often conveyed through physical distance on stage. The dancers run to and from each other and jump into each other’s arms, out of fear, agony, longing, or desire. Wenders’ 3D allows us to feel the full effect of these distances and their collapse. In the first extended piece – the primordial, aggressive, disturbing Rite of Spring, performed by barely clothed men and women on a stage covered with soil – we watch the Neanderthal-like male lead stand before a fear-stricken, huddled group of women. Shot over the male’s shoulder, the anxiety and power dynamics of the situation shoots through the screen.

Or, as Wenders remarked in his introduction, the screen in fact disappears as a restriction to our viewing. In each performance, as the stage fills with more people and Bausch’s exploration of space becomes more elaborate, more explicit, it becomes increasingly clear that Wenders needed 3D not for what pops out at you from the screen but for the increasing depth of image it creates. The 3D image begins at the audience member and extends out dynamically, so that in Pina, the full extent of the choreography is suddenly at hand, the different planes of action in the fore, middle, and background at once clear yet distinct from each other.

Parts of what we see in Pina are filmed public performances, but Wenders importantly does not only shoot from the pseudo-objective audience perspective. In all the dances, he makes his camera part of the performance, placing it in the middle of the stage to get a particular point of view, or moving it along with the dancers in order to best capture the heart of the movement. Here it is not the technology that is on display but Wenders’ technical ability, his artistic prowess, his obvious familiarity and love for the material. 3D gives the necessary look, but Wenders’ shots and edits are what allow the emotional effect that he described – the enthralling moment when one begins to move with the dancers and feel their emotions with them – to come through. When the camera swoops elegantly from one side of the stage to the other or tracks to get a close up shot of a particular dancer, this is not how we see dance on stage but it is how we feel it.

The four Bausch pieces that Pina features – Rite of Spring, Café Müller, Kontakthof, and Vollmond  – are danced on stage. But for the rest of the film, Wenders spotlights solos or duets performed by each of the dancers in Bausch’s company. These scenes take place in various outdoor locations, from urban locales like a railway station, a factory, or a street corner, to natural landscapes: the edge of a river, a forest, a desert canyon.

It’s in these scenes that Pina most transcends documentation and becomes a celebration. Whereas in the staged scenes the 3D helps to realistically convey the full force and emotion of the dances, in the outdoor scenes the 3D visuals so shimmer and shine that realism is lost: the backdrops are resplendent to the point of looking like painted images. In such a world, the dancers, who sweep, tiptoe, dash, and spin through the various locations, seem part of a dream. A new world comes alive before us, one like our own but made magic by Wenders’ camera and the dancers’ movements. The dancers, whose performances are wordless answers to Wenders’ questions about Bausch, take their love of the late choreographer into the world and enliven the surroundings with her spirit.

All this adds up to a spectacular, if draining experience, a full throttle ride through one woman’s way of seeing, one woman’s transcendent expression of the basic tensions, frailties, and vulnerabilities of human life, but also of its many joys and splendors. In Pina, with Pina and her dancers, Wenders has presented Bausch’s life’s work with the passion and care it deserves.

Dance at its heart is an exploration of life through movement, itself one of our most basic relations to space, the world, and the people around us. So when Bausch speaks at the end of the film, “dance, dance, otherwise we are lost,” it is a vocal reminder (unneeded, to a certain extent, after all the visual ones that preceded it) of the basic primacy of her art: dance as a window to the ground floor of the human experience; dance as nothing short of life itself.

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Our pale subject is Lucy (Emily Browning), a college student working multiple underpaid jobs, each as meaningless and empty as the next: office drone, lonely waitress, research rat. It’s clear she needs the money but there’s something more that propels her to compulsively work all the time. She seems to be empty, looking for something to fill the void. This leads her to answer an unusual ad in the paper, propelling her into a world of unusual sex work.

What do I mean by unusual sex work?  Well, at first it seems fairly innocuous. She arrives at a mansion run by a classy madam named Clara (Rachel Blake). There she dresses up as the fair virgin, in shell-colored lingerie, and is required to wear a lipstick shade that, wait for it, matches the color of her labia. Inside the mansion is a dinner party for a select group of older clientele, who dine while Lucy pours brandies, and taller, older Robert Palmeresque women in sexy black outfits act as human props for the guests to grab at and prod. Then things take a turn – Lucy gets “promoted” to a higher-paying role that involves the utmost discretion. In this case promotion requires that Lucy drink a narcotic tea that makes her unconscious. Naked, she is placed in a stylized bedroom, where clients who are promised full privacy are allowed to do anything they want to the unconscious “sleeping beauty” with one caveat: no penetration.

That exception seems like a joke, as if to intimate that the only sexual violation a woman can experience is that of unwanted penetration. There are so many more ways to violate a person as we learn by witnessing a series of older men exercise not only their deepest desires upon the coma-induced child-like “woman”, but also lament their loss of youth. One man takes his sadism out, burning a cigarette behind her ear. The sleeping beauty doesn’t even feel her skin burn as she slumbers away peacefully. Another man merely cuddles and sleeps next to her.  Another throws her around, eventually too saddened by her unwilling state to do anything to her. Each of these men stand in stark opposition to her tiny nubile, almost ageless figure. The exposed milkiness of her fair skin, her hair that seems spun from gold make her almost an unreal figure. She becomes a symbol, allowing the viewer to also indulge in pure voyeurism with no consequence. When Clara reassures the men, “You’ll be safe here. There’s no shame. No one can see you,” she’s also talking to us. We’re safe in our film-going seats. No one can see us.  Which leaves me to wonder about the ramifications of being a voyeur in a film where a young woman is forced into a situation where she is unable to know what is being done to her body, and has landed there potentially because of her financial situation and the implied neglect she suffered as a child.

While “no penetration” is the rule for the clients, it also seems to be a possible thematic framework with which to analyze this film. There seems to be no penetration of any kind. We don’t get to see much of Lucy’s inner life. We hear briefly that her mother is an alcoholic, and we see Lucy mete out her limited affections for her troubled, literary addict friend Birdman. Yet the film doesn’t draw these threads out far enough to get us close enough to Lucy to understand or make meaning. I couldn’t help but draw the conclusion that her willingness to do anything for anyone stemmed from always being the caretaker to an adult parent unable to do so themselves. Without penetration we are unable to see inside our protagonist. Instead we are left on the surface, with no answer, and not even any probing questions to answer for ourselves. Rather, while the film shows the desires of various men nearing their deathbeds, it fails to show us any of Lucy’s desire, inevitably giving us an uneven playing field, where all the power is left to the rich, old, white guys. Additionally, as Lucy sleeps and is prodded, we too know more about her than she does, lumping us in with the creepy clientele.

Luckily the film is evocative and a promising first effort; it’s a sign that both director Leigh and actress Browning have bright futures ahead. The film is visually stunning; the collaboration between cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson, production designer Annie Beauchamp and director Leigh render many of the shots to look like living Manets. The long, uninterrupted takes, perhaps a nod to Kubrick, show Leigh’s gifts as a director in focusing our attention instead of allowing us escape.

Ultimately, the film feels like a pretty face with not much to say. It raises issues of sex work as empowerment versus enslavement, the idea of defiling the pure youthful virgin, the way desire can devour ethics, and yet those issues seem to be drowned out by the soft-core hyper-stylized seduction of it all. While the film leaves its troubling premise largely unanswered for, it does try to probe the fascinating question that dominates most current psychoanalytic thought: what are we beyond our desires? Maybe, as the film suggests, nothing.

***

Sleeping Beauty is playing at San Francisco Film Society Cinema (1746 Post Street) through February 2.

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Central to the drama is the somewhat gothic figure of Germaine Greer, whose sullen glamour is flanked by Jacqueline Ceballos of the National Organization for Women (NOW) – who seems rather in awe of her – the scattershot Jill Johnston (the Marcus Garvey of Lesbos) and the didactic Diana Trilling. Greer, all cheekbones and dark fur coat, is radical feminism as illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, tall, languid, and sharp as a dagger employed to open hate mail; the hate male in question being Norman Mailer who was perhaps at the height of both his powers and his self-lacerating introspection, which is perhaps to say the same thing. As moderator, Devil’s advocate and stunt man, while gore fills the water Mailer lashes himself to the wheel and heroically attempts to steer the bloody boat through the hectoring winds of the massive audience at Town Hall, New York University.

If you fail to be impressed by this spectacle of five incredibly articulate, deeply flawed human beings torn between the sex war imperatives of making killer academic arguments and cussing like sailors, then you should consider yourself a rather fleshless person. Of many things surfacing from the debate in Pennebaker’s film is the fact that something has been lost or elided from more contemporary documentaries capturing elements of the history of feminism (Kerri Koch’s Don’t Need You: The Herstory of Riot Grrrl, for example) which is precisely this visceral humor, the ability to stare down the danger, the hecklers (there are many), to not avoid the media moment. Implicit in all documents of riot grrrl, as a generational feminism coalesced around punk and a discrete pop culture located somewhere between craft circles and kung fu (and of which I am an admirer), is the forlorn question: what happens when the music stops? The answer is not that much. There is something elegiac about talking about riot grrrl. By contrast, in Town Bloody Hall the conflicts or navigations of the sexes are articulated with élan, wit, and through both good- and bad-natured mauling. Precious little is resolved. It doesn’t bookend or commemorate a movement so much as it implies the vastness of its solvent complexities. When the organ muzak that closes the film ends, you know that the debate goes out roiling under the neon and awnings, has several drinks and continues to demand: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It doesn’t matter who blinks. Everybody blinks. Mailer is outnumbered and sometimes outwitted. Sometimes it’s just a pecking party, and despite a low blow, he manages to strut away with belt held aloft. In other moments he is imprisoned by sexism, and not always his own. Is it merely water they are drinking on that stage? But Town Bloody Hall is not about the verdict. It is about the agony, the classical struggle; Germaine Greer and Norman Mailer are both Tiresias.

Greer and Mailer trade trash and shit with one another, with the rest of the panel, and with the “assholes talking to assholes” up in the dress circle. It’s more of a riot than anything that happened in the early 1990s. And it’s hilarious. Witness the cameo by Gregory Corso who storms out in fury at Ceballos after barely five minutes. Witness Greer harpooning the man who asks her what exactly post-feminist fucking should be like. Witness Mailer agreeing to concede a round when asked what color ink he dips his balls in to write, and having the public, or pubic modesty to admit that he is quite capable of writing junk. Witness the stage invasion of groping that ends Jill Johnston’s punhouse mirror show of poetics, and her making out with fans in front of the lectern as Mailer tries to recover order. Questions from the audience come from, among others, the deafening Betty Friedan and the demure Susan Sontag. Mailer goes after the white whale of feminist literary criticism that can’t tell the fish from the plankton, that somehow fails to distinguish between the author and his characters. Trilling the frump gets pedantic with Greer the gorgon. Greer calls Sylvia Plath a fool. Ceballos calls for women to be insured against divorce. Hair is pulled. Teeth are gnashed. What more can you want? Town Bloody Hall beats with the forceful pulse of spontaneity, honesty, and with all of the confusion that is sex. As with all of the best parties someone freaks out, someone goes missing, someone is thrown out, and in waves of misheard banter and the swollen intoxications of ego, everyone loses something of their dignity.

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Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott’s first feature film, Cherry, has been accepted into the Berlin International Film Festival. The film will make it’s world premiere February 16 at the 1,600 seat Friedrichsstadtpalast in Berlin.

About Cherry. Stills from the movie.

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“I really hope I don’t have to do this every year. After this morning’s announcement we feminist film enthusaists, once again, find ourselves frustrated at Hollywood and the Academy’s gross oversight of the work of female directors. This year, the omission of women and people of color from the Best Director category comes as no surprise to most including the key players involved, the directors themselves.”

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