Noite da Fe / Night of Faith

Periods of public refrain are necessary for the mind to unravel its velvet webs and dripping veins. I refrain in order for the exchange to be complete. There are thoughts and processes which belong to the realm of silence, silent tongues and pulsing steps. The immaterial thoughts laid upon this silent page turn into textures, colors, lights, gestures and this harmonic cacophony descends into the dark night. El Greco. The night of faith, Joao da Cruz. A woman inside a room as night descends. “The very eye of the night” watches and accompanies her. A pas-de-deuxbetween the eye and the woman. A tango, an elegy, a thought, a gestures, a space, a movement, an image.

El Greco

“Therese” , Cavalier

A clip from Cavalier’s “Therese” – not Avila, but Therese de Lisieux, who is very connected to Avila because of her sensibility in writing and her ‘romantic’ love of God-. The film reads the life of Therese in terms of her religious life in conflict with her unconsummated sexuality.

Woman / God / World / Man / Woman

The nature of this project is exactly its fluidity. Thinking and seeing as being and feeling immersed in water. In the comings and goings of these waves, my manifesto of intention which will also progressively transform and mutate, now gains a more concrete body. I realize that my question is not entirely about the idea of an specificity to a feminist kind of sensibility in film. What i question is film’s capacity to allude to subjectivity. When working within a medium that by nature infers mediation, a technological mediation, the subject will be constructed upon the walls of this mediation – something that Brackage was consistently trying to overcome in his films. Further, the central character is St. Teresa of Avila†, who have been silently speaking along the lines of my research on femininity and the divine. Now it is time to give Teresa her voice, as the central character of this project. The character who will express and re-construct a feminine imaginary, through her spiritual power. Amen.

We need to reconfigure the relationships between woman and world, woman and god, woman and father, woman and man in order to move into a new age of more fluid and ethical relationships. Film is essentially a medium that enables a reconfiguration of time-space relations and furthermore a medium which- in particular forms- consistently strives to ‘penetrate’ or allude to a sense of human subjectivity. If film can pose questions of interiority and exteriority through its capacity to sculpture time and place, then it is through film that I would like to express my own visions of a reconfiguration of the feminine subject in relation to faith, subjectivity and corporeality.

†

D’Est

“I would like to make a grand journey … I’d like to shoot everything. Everything that moves me. Faces, streets, cars going by and buses, train stations and plains (…) oceans, streams and brooks, trees and forests. Fields and factories (…) Food, interiors, doors, windows, meals being prepared….”
“I want to film in order to understand”
(Chantel Akerman cited in Bruno, G 2001, p. 102-103)

“…the land one possess is always a form of barbarism and blood, while the land one traverses without taking it reminds them of a book…” (Chantel Akerman cited in Bruno, G 2001, p. 102)

extract from: D’Est (dir. Chantel Akerman 1993)

Atlas of Emotion

Giuliana Bruno’s “Atlas of Emotion” is written with a means to create a topography of the history of cinema in relation to art, film and architecture. Therein, the book had chapters and passages that were of use for this research paper, centrally because Bruno weaves a feminist perspective through her dissertations of space as gendered space. These passages where mainly extracted from the chapter Traveling Domestic, the Movie “House”, where she addresses specific films in relation to their depiction of the domestic space as being symbolized by woman, as home, as womb, as return. Bruno depicts a very detailed analysis of film’s ability to mobilize and de-mobilize spatial conventions and time-space relations, in its shaping or sculpturing of time and space. The writing’s on Antonioni’s
“Red Desert” were specially interesting, since in the work of Antonioni the relationship between space and subjectivity is central to the symbolic nature of his work.

Here, I use Bruno as a means to illuminate / elucidate the relationship between film and feminist writing by means of proposing a re-organization of time-space relations, following my readings of Irigaray. Bruno was an illuminating writer for this research, specially in relation to my film project, where my intuitions and ideas on how to construct a feminine aesthetic were deeply discussed by Bruno in her views on the works of Chantel Akerman and Antonioni.

“Filmic movement is a cultural passage. A practice of imaging that participates in the modern philosophical project of mobilizing space, cinema has been home to various forms of nomadism, including some gendered female” (Bruno, G 2001, p. 95)

“We must retrace the genealogy of the female subject’s positions in site-seeing, undoing the fixidity of binary systems that have immobilized her and effaced her from the map of mobility” (Bruno. G 2001, p. 85)

Manisfesto of Intention

We need to reconfigure the relationships between man and woman, man and world, man and god, man and man (Irigaray, 1993a) in order to move into a new age of more fluid relationships and towards an internal enlightment. Film is essentially a medium that enables the reconfiguration of time / space relations which are crucial to the formation of this new sensibility and economy of a new ethics of sexual difference.

I intend to develop a film that expresses the relationships between woman and the divine, as a means to allude to the idea of a sensible transcendental in order to create a meaningful work about the feminine universe.

Why?

It matters because art (in this, my medium is cinema) can express and represent the gaps, the intervals, the pauses that are intrinsically necessary for our collective meditation on our conditions (as Self, as Being, as Body, as Mind).

Drawing Connections

An intrinsic concept of feminist studies is the idea of the feminine universe being a universe of subjectivity, multiplicity, openness… This concept is developed from questions of the female body and psychic. Of the multiplicities of impulses and directions that run in the studies of the feminine psychic. With the beginning of psychoanalysis, the studies of the feminine psychic started with Freud whose study of the case Dora is the founding ground to the introduction of his concept and diagnosis of her hysteria, which was seemingly a consequence of sexual repression. Freud’s studies on hysteric woman is a central focus of attack from the perspective of feminist writers, who frame Freud’s theory as demonstrative of the oppresive discourse of patriarchy. Freud configures the female sex as not sex, as castrated.

I am here introducing the basic concepts of psychoanalysis in order to contextualize the work of Luce Irigaray, who is a central figure in what American philosophers call French Feminism. Irigaray proposes that in order for us move beyond this age of oppressive patriarchy we must reconfigure the relations between man/man, man/world, man/god, man/woman (from Ethics of Sexual Difference). In this proposition, Irigaray lays out the central conceptual concern of this project.

Woman ought to be able to find herself among other things, through the images of herself already deposited in history and the condition of production of the work of man (“Ethics of Sexual Difference”)

Woman must be able to reconfigure herself outside of a culture that has confined and oppressed her Sex, her Being, her Mind. This is not a social political fight, but one that invites for an internal transformation, something that touches on the metaphysics of a transcendental sensibility, which will take on a form of the soul, the spirit, the divine.

In further reading of Giuliana Bruno I found that the connection between my interest in feminist writing and experimental film, is the capacity that film, as a medium for art and expression, has to renegotiate time / space relations. Herein, I believe that feminist film practices will intrinsically be related to experimental forms, since it questions and challenges the hierarchy, patriarchy and oppressiveness of our social-sexual order.

“Film space is the very vehicle of this mobilized thinking, for, among other things, its site-seeing offers us a way to mobilize the very space of sexual dwelling”

The question is how to interweave and meditate upon issues and concepts of and for the representation of these ideas. It fluctuates in the depths of my dreaming.