6th. International Women's Film Festival 1997

Uncanny Pleasures
March 12th.-16th. 1997

Introduction:

Our starting point at this year's Festival is a pleasurable shiver down the spine. Ghosts, myths, monsters and terrifying creatures of all kinds have populated the human imagination and literature since time began. That roller coaster of the emotions which takes off when we watch a thriller, horror, action or adventure film gives the audience much uncanny pleasure, unholy pleasures indeed.

At first sight, you might think that this is a theme that would not be productive in terms of a female perspective since the women in such movies are all too often cast in a victim role. However, the very contradictory nature of viewer emotions inspired us to look at the matter in a different light precisely because the whole idea of UNCANNY PLEASURES does not automatically connect with women directors. Nevertheless, women have had their share in creating the classic horror figures - Mary Shelley, for example, the creator of Frankenstein.

But not just literature, cinema too has turned to adventure and suspense as a source of subject material. Over the last few years especially, there has been a veritable flood of action movies and thrillers. This seemingly insatiable fascination for the genre has caused femme totale to time-travel through the history of the cinema in an attempt to find a link between the beginnings of the cinema and more recent movie developments: from early sensational films to the virtual worlds of the 1990s and from the art film to the B-movie.

The usual series of talks and workshops have been rounded up for the Festival and hopefully they have stimulated our guests to lively debate!

All in all, we presented a deliberately subjective selection of works from an abundance of existing productions centered on our chosen theme. The selection is often shaped by the pressures of the short time at our disposal. However, we have taken care to allow as many film forms of expression as possible to "take the floor".

Depending on personal taste, some of you will find your favourite films missing and some of you will enjoy the rediscovery of films long not seen. This year, unfortunately, films from the developing countries, South America and Hong Kong are underrepresented - a deficit largely due to the fact that the genre dominating this year's Festival is one that is basically at home in the industrialised countries. More "serious" films or technically interesting films would not have fitted easily into our overall themes. Be that as it may, we hope that the Festival has been full of surprises and entertainment value for all those attending.



Film Programmes
The Unsettling Screen

Smart Detectives and Mysterious Women - The Silent Movie Programme

Time for Anger - Political Thriller

Deadly Kisses: Vampire Films

Bad Grrrls - There's Nothing Like Starting Young!

Bloodcurdling Fun: Genre Parody and Black Comedy

Suspense and Avantgarde

Cyber Visions - Or the desire to become another person(?)

The Lady Vanishes: Alma Reville/Hitchcock

Homage to Kathryn Bigelow



The Unsettling Screen
The unsettling screen deliberately exploits the emotions and feelings of the audience. Thrills, excitement, relief, shock, anxiety - and the release of tension at the happy end - all interact with one another. However, the unsettling in the world of film covers much more than tension, thrill and horror. Articulated here is a feeling of disquiet with culture and society as a whole - enmpathy with the cryptic and the surreptitious that is at home both in the psychothriller and in black comedy. A glimpse behind the facade often reveals something truly horrible: a serial killer in a completely ordinary, nondescript tenement flat or a case of religious mania in a middle-class family or Satanic possession in a High School.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, the ghoulish or the terrible invades everyday life. Under the surface of the normal and the everyday, something new emerges: something threatening.

When women directors and screenwriters send their hero or heroine on the hunt for clues, this is often combined with a disturbing journey into the past. The childhood home becomes a haunted house. Memories result in family skeletons leaping out of the cupboard. Nerve-wracking darkness symbolises repressed experiences. In Vacant Possession, for example, the journey back also uncovers ethnic conflict. The death of the mother - the starting point to the story in the film - swiftly devolves into a scrutiny of the power structures in place between the generations, the sexes and different cultures.

Films:
Angela
USA 1994/103 min./Rebecca Miller

The Bather
GB 1994/10 min./Susannah Gent

Birth of the Wizard
JPN 1996/83 min./Shimako Sato

Bloodlight
GB 1996/14 min./Jane Rogoyska

La Couveuse
P/F 1995/28 min./Jeanne Waltz

Le Journal du Seducteur
F 1995/95 min./Daniéle Dubroux

The Juniper Tree
IS/USA 1990/86 min./Nietzschka Keene

The Occasion
GB 1994/8:30 min./Susan Loughlin

On verra
D 1995/9 min./Eveline Stähelin

Picoti Picota
CDN 1995/10 min./Manon Briand

Pregunta por mi
ES 1996/4 min./Bego§a Vicario

Sanctuary
AUS 1995/94 min./Robin de Crespigny

Shoot Me Angel
F 1995/9 min./Amal Bedjaoui

Sister my Sister
GB 1994/89 min./Nancy Meckler

Steinich
D 1996/5 min./Susanne Fassbender

Stripped to Kill
USA 1987/84 min./Katt Shea

Thread
GB 1993/7 min./Susannah Gent

Vacant Possession
AUS 1994/95 min./Margot Nash

La Vie est Brutale
F 1995/18 min./Eve Brian

Wizard of Darkness
JPN 1995/81 min./Shimako Sato

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Smart Detectives and Mysterious Women
The Silent Movie Programme

If anything, the roots of the cinema and television lie in the vaudeville, freak show and kinetoscope tradition - in the presentation of weird and wonderful marvels such as "wild savages", "women without abdomen", "Amazons" and a host of other spectacles that would send a shiver down the spectators' spines. The fairground of attractions thus formed the backdrop to the first motion pictures which revelled in "shocking" images and "sensations previously never seen". Nevertheless, it was not the filmed topics that shocked but rather the authenticity of the moving pictures. The consternation and the awe that the early film shows invoked were so great that some members of the audience literally lost control of their senses.

Sensational films are full of ambivalence and ambiguities. Double agents, camouflaged existences, subterfuge via disguise and mask, women in trousers and men dressed up as women ... are all part of the sensational film repertoire. Things, and this is virtually the plot, are never what they seem.

But apart from the suspense - or "high octane excitement" as the adverts often claimed - these films provide us with some insight into the world of women and their social differentness. A dubious Domina stops at nothing, nothing, to get the man of her choice whilst the lady detective - thanks to cunning, intelligence and the power of disguise - is more than a match for the male heros of the early movie serials. The female characters of the early sensational films thus convey an aesthetic and political ambiguity that an audience today can still enjoy.

For more about the silent screen era, please see the special programme devoted to Alma Reville (aka Mrs Hitchcock)

Films:
Das Geheimnis von Chateau Richmond
D 1913/ca. 45 min./Willy Zeyn/Actress:Senta Eichstaedt

Die Jagd nach der Hundertpfundnote oder Die Reise um die Welt
D 1913/ca. 60 min./Willy Zeyn/Actress: Senta Eichstaedt

The Perils of Pauline
USA 1913/14/Episoden, je 33 min./Donald Mackenzie/Actress: Pearl Fay White

Die schwarze Kugel oder Die geheimnisvollen Schwestern
D 1913/ca. 39 min./Franz Hofer

Die schwarze Natter
D 1913/ca. 30 min./Franz Hofer

Der Steckbrief
D 1913/ca. 25 min./Franz Hofer

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Time for Anger - Political Thriller
The thriller is the "cinema of fear" per se for it must offer far greater portions of tension and fright to the moviegoers than other kinds of film. In all thrillers, we see the characters in the action having to face some kind of existential threat against a broad spectrum of dangerous motives: blackmail, the race against time, murder threats, psychopaths, crimes of passion, the individual struggling against a malevolent world, psychological terror, the speed of events lurching out of control, doppelgänger and paranoia. If the thriller is to be in any way exciting, it must ensure that the scary and threatening events undergone by the screen protagonists can be coexperienced by the viewers in their seats - without them knowing much more than the characters in the story.

In the political thriller, we often find authentic political events combined with a fictional story. Due to intensive actual coexperience of what is shown, political events become terrifyingly understandable to the public.

Films: Born in Flames
USA 1983/90 min./Lizzie Borden

Friends
GB/F 1993/109 min./Elaine Proctor

Welcome to the Terrordome
GB 1995/90 min./Ngozi A. Onwurah

Wicked Women
AUS 1995/16 min./Tanja George

Zeit des Zorns
I 1993/90 min./Margarethe von Trotta

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Deadly Kisses: Vampire Films
Deadly eroticism and an erotic death are inseparably intertwined in a vampire's kiss. Fascinated by the darker sides of human existence, the victims (and the cinemagoers) vacillate between desire and terror. As a hybrid form - not dead, not alive - the vampire subverts both the natural order of things and the assurance of fixed identities.

All the same: if vampires once stood for personified evil wanting to drag the living into their demi-monde, women filmmakers of today are taking us into the very psyche of the bloodsucking undead. Though the vampires are still supernatural beings from another world, these women film directors are attempting to make us understand the anxieties, torments and motives of the vampire. The dread-inspiring alien being (who has always been more interesting than straight heroes anyway) has unashamedly become someone to sympathise with, an object of pity. The line that once divided perpetrator and victim is now no longer fixed.

The whole concept of female vampire deserves a category of its own. Female desire, a subject simply banished from the screen by mainstream cinema, is transposed to the realm of the supernaturally possible and finds expression in the shape of woman vampires. As a hybrid being - not living, not dead - women are finally allowed to desire. During the 1950s and the 1960s, we saw a veritable boom in lesbian vampire films. By the beginning of the 1970s, though, the relationship between vampire and female victim was being rendered in the pornographic mode. The vampire motif had become a metaphor for a lesbian lifestyle pathologising friendships between women: the female vampire uses her bite to infect her victim.

In more contemporary films, the mould is being broken again. The fascinated mortal being in Because the Dawn wanders through the night looking for the female vampire - and not the other way round. The lesbian vampire, normally cast as the Evil Desiring She, is transfigured into an object of desire for the female gaze.

Films:
Because the Dawn
USA 1988/40 min./Amy Goldstein

Blood & Donuts
CND 1995/89 min./Holly Dale

Isabell
D 1995/2 min./Sofia Suarez Bonilla

Nadja
USA 1994/95 min./Michael Almereyda

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Bad Grrrls - There's Nothing Like Starting Young!
The days when most young women over the age of sixteen considered the designation "girl" to be insulting are clearly a thing of the past. Nowadays, completely self-aware, they call themselves "girls" and the word has lost its connotations of cuteness and best behaviour. On the contrary, these girls are unpredictable, uncouth, unconcerned, unashamed and unsettling ... grrrls! At the start of the 1990s, women punk bands in the USA - Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, L 7 and Babes in Toyland - began to take on the male-dominated punk scene. The RIOT GRRRLS were born. Their brand of punk was just as uncompromising as that of their male counterparts and the lyrics were wild and angry. On stage, roaring their dissatisfaction, the girl bands instantly caught the mood of many girls and women.

It wasn't long before the girl bands were being feted by the media. By the early 1990s, they had become the darlings of MTV, Newsweek, glossy magazines and various talk shows. Courtney Love - widow of Kurt Cobain and lead singer of Hole - landed on the front page of Vanity Fair. The pop and fashion industry greedily fed off the phenomenon. Comics in which girls assume the role of brutal superheroes (Tank Girl, Bad Girl, Super Girl) came onto the market.

Films:
Can Girls be Butchers too?
CH 1995/16 min./Doraine Green

The Devil Inside
USA 1995/8 min./Jennifer Reeder

Dogs - The Rise and Fall of an All Girl Bookie Joint
USA 1995/80 min./Eve Annenberg

Good Sister/Bad Sister
USA 1996/30 min./Liza Johnson

Groove on a Stanley Knife
GB 1996/41:58 min./Anantini (Tinge) Krishnan, Beth Kotler

Poison Ivy
USA 1991/98 min./Katt Shea Ruben

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Bloodcurdling Fun: Genre Parody and Black Comedy
The ambivalence inherent to the thriller and the horror film reaches its zenith in the genre of splatter and slasher movies - a genre that typically causes the audience not to petrify with fear but burst out laughing. The preconditions on which this effect is based are: (i) the uninhibited ransacking of film history for quotes and material (ii) blood streaming copiously and (iii) an aesthetic that falls back on the B-movie. The border between horror comedy and genre parody - both merrily dancing on the tightrope of pleasure and terror, angst and entertainment - is very permeable indeed.

If horror and splatter movies with their excessive anarchic images often mount an attack on social and sexual hierarchies in general, then genre parodies and black comedies frequently set about dismantling social categories with an even more outrageous lack of respect. The order that reigns between good and evil, female and male, above and below etc. etc. are all lost in a maze of exaggeration, ironicisation, quotations, grotesque decor and bizarre scenes.

Thanks to their taste for excess, exaggeration, grotesque bodies and weird figures and thanks to their revelling in monstrosities of all conceivable kinds, black comedies and genre parodies reiterate and extend the horror movie and thriller conventions. The skilful way with which they handle the stock of footage from film archives also lets the audience wander to and fro between the different levels of meaning, genre, parody, quote and irony.

Films:
Die-Cycle
IRL 1995/17 min./Rachael Moriarty, Peter Murphy u.a.

DER LETZTE COWBOY
D 1996/1,30 min./Roswitha Menzel

Marie Antoinette is niet dood
NL 1995/93 min./Irma Achten

Murder in a Mist
USA 1984/29 min./Lisa Gottlieb

A Small Domain
USA 1995/18 min./Britta Sjogren

Stroke
NZ 1993/8 min./Christine Jeffs

The Tin Man
USA 1935/15 min./James Parrott/Actress: Thelma Todd, Patsy Kelly

Vermisst: I. Merx, Privatdetektivin
CH 1987/35 min./Dagmar Heinrich

Zimmer 313
D 1995/15 min./Birgit Lehmann

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Suspense and Avantgarde
Mainstream and avantgarde, Hollywood and experimental film, thrilling cinematic entertainment and indigestible film art ... categories traditionally defined as crass opposites. The main concern of femme totale's "Suspense and Avantgarde" programme will therefore be to deconstruct these received antitheses by presenting a selection of films which - despite the wide historical gap between them - operate on the basis of drama, excitement and thrills and also which draw on the motives and narratives of the crime and horror genres to create new material. How have women interested in the art of film - from around, say, 1913 until today - manipulated the laws of production and the rules of the genre as set by the commercial cinema? How have they adapted them and/or distanced them? Where exactly have they extended the limits of standard aesthetics and dramaturgy?

The film-making contexts range from the early studio production of Suspense to the freewheeling artistic productions of the 1990s as exemplified by Animali Criminali. Similarly, the techniques deployed are different. Whereas Suspense (1913) worked with the then revolutionary split-screen method to depict the varying perspectives of the characters on screen and thus raise tension, Germaine Dulac's La Souriante Madame Beudet relies on the interruption of linear strands of narrative via visions and flashbacks (double exposure and distorting lens techniques etc.) in order to conjure up enigmatic parallel worlds. Thriller is indeed a thriller but it also distances itself from the genre with the victim reviewing her own death and musing on the significance of the female figures for the story. And, finally, Animali Criminali reduces ad absurdum a traditional action dramaturgy (the kill as the climax of the hunt) as the various plot climaxes are all shown consecutively. The philosophy of "survival of the fittest", a standard ingredient of action cinema in general and of the thriller in particular, is in this way exposed and designated bizarre.

Films:
Animali Criminali
I 1994/7 min./Angela Ricci-Lucchi, Yervant Gainikian

Backcomb
GB 1995/6 min./Sarah Pucill

Eine Hand Voll Schlaf
D 1995 /50 min./Bettina Höchel

La Souriante Madame Beudet
F 1922/33 min./stumm/Germaine Dulac

Suspense
USA 1913/23 min./stumm/Lois Weber.

Thriller
GB 1979/34 min./Sally Potter

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Cyber Visions
Or the desire to become another person(?)

The boundaries between the natural world (that we still know best via the senses of hearing, seeing, tasting and feeling) and the artificial world of the computer are interlacing more and more. Our perception of, and the definition of, terms such as reality and virtuality are not only changing; they are also undergoing permanent reinvention. An "interpersonal relationship" has become a very elastic term, one that is quite capable of embracing a virtual partner, a being that only exists in computer space.

That an individual might attempt to create herself as someone else is an idea and a desire as old as the human race itself and usually finds expression in a number of ways: body painting, tattooing, ritual mutilation, carnival disguise and cosmetic surgery as well as - nowadays - the game of changing identities in cyberspace. Cybertrippers do not withdraw into synthetic worlds just because the "real" world is a threatening place (and, due to the pollution of the environment, an increasingly disintegrating one) but also because, in cyberspace, there seems to be a greater acceptance of the Other. Equally, the desire to change one's identity is tolerated.

What is chiefly fascinating about an encounter with other people in virtual space is the fact that the stranger's secrets can be kept, distance can be maintained and your identity can be freely selected. The charm of letting your imagination roam whilst simultaneously remaining anonymous as a person conceals great creative potential. And conflicts are few and far between - unless, of course, the other interactor feels deceived when true identities or other illusions are eventually laid bare.

Films:
Cyber-Memory
F 1995/8 min./FrÇdÇrique Ribis

The Desert Broadcasting System
D 1995/15 min./Jenny Ramcke

Double Cross Click Click
D 1995/30 min./Lynn Hershman

Kugelkopf (Ode an IBM)
A 1985/6 min./Mara Mattuschka

Lost in Telespace: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Lover
AUS/GB 1995/10 min./Fanny Jacobsen, Colleen Cruise

Nicht nur Wasser
D 1995/26 min./Rotraut Pape

PANDAEMONIUM
USA 1995/49 min./Leslie Asako Gladsjo

Stigmata:/The Transfigured Body
USA 1992/27 min./Leslie Asako Gladsjo

Synthetic Pleasures
USA 1995/83 min./Iara Lee

Utopia
USA 1994/5:02 min./Max Almy, Teri Yarbrow

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The Lady Vanishes: Alma Reville/Hitchcock
At this year's film festival, under the nicely ironic title of "The Lady Vanishes", femme totale is proud to present another discovery ... the work of Alma Reville. Or should we say Mrs Hitchcock? Even before her years of collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock, Alma had been successful in the film industry as a screenwriter, dialogue author, director's assistant, film editor, scriptgirl and Girl Friday. In an interview given in 1976, she revealed how she was working as a cutter's assistant by the age of sixteen: initially at Twickenham Studios and then at the Famous Players-Lasky Studios in London. "Because," she continued, "it was only place where it would be possible to work without any experience". When Alfred Hitchcock first entered the business (as a director's assistant and set designer), Alma Reville had already been commanding respect for four years - a true professional who was able to handle the demanding tasks of scripting, cutting and continuity to perfection. She belonged to the select circle of women film editors whose names were included in the opening credits. Influential producers and directors predicted a great career for her as director.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Alma Reville - along with cameraman Bernard Knowles, producer Michael Balcon and film editors Charles Frend - made up the highly successful team at British Gaumont responsible for such classics as The 39 Steps and The Secret Agent. In Hollywood too, she was Hitchcock's closest collaborator, working on nearly all of his films from behind the scenes. She advised him on the choice of suitable material and screenplays, took care of the actors, watched the first rushes and suggested alterations. One of her major strengths was a skill at adapting novels for the screen. It was her job, for example, to convert Thornton Wilder's draft scenario for Shadow of a Doubt (1943) into film-literate form since, in her own words, "I have a visual way of thinking". Occasionally, on into to the 1940s, she also served in a screenwriter capacity for other directors such as Adrian Brunel, Donald Crisp, Henrik Galeen and Richard Wallace.

Like many other women in the history of the cinema married to "great" directors or actors - Natacha Rambova Valentino being a case in point - Alma Reville was destined to be at once famous and invisible.

Films:
After the Verdict
GB 1928/82 min./stumm/Henrik Galeen/Drehbuch: Alma Reville

The Lodger - A Story of the London Fog
GB 1925/98 min./stumm/Alfred Hitchcock/Regieassistenz: Alma Reville

The Pleasure Garden
GB 1925/92 min./stumm/Alfred Hitchcock/Regieassistenz, Skript: Alma Reville

Young and Innocent
GB 1937/84 min./Alfred Hitchcock/Drehbuch: Alma Reville u.a.








Homage to Kathryn Bigelow
A Journey into the Night: Images and Quotes

"... There's two ways of looking at a moment and they're both cinematic: Either suspend it and examine it as if under a magnifying glass, with great detail, or have it be instantaneous, blink and you've missed it which is more realistic, but in the perception of reality. Suspension of time for me is by cinematic choice and what I would imagine an event to be like".
(Kathryn Bigelow)

Films:
Point Break
USA 1991/122 min./Kathryn Bigelow

The Loveless
USA 1981/83 min./Kathryn Bigelow, Monty Montgomery

Near Dark - Die Nacht hat ihren Preis
USA 1987/92 min./Kathryn Bigelow

Set Up
USA 1978/15 min./Kathryn Bigelow

Strange Days
USA 1995/139 min./Kathryn Bigelow