Camp has to do with posing. Maybe it is about the French origin of the word, maybe it is about the theatrical element of posing for an old photo or for a painting. Camp bodies express excess, dolce far niente, non-productivity, they escape the capitalist logic of production, of efficiency, of giving all you got, of dying on stage. It is always about something more, something in excess, something that goes beyond the expectations. I remember the perfect example: Odin actors were studying not photos but paintings to increase the theatricality of their movement on stage, to go beyond the every-day-life energy, to dilate their bodies. The reason was that there is an inherent excess there, the painted models have to stay for a long time in one position that cannot be efficient in a daily situation. A Camp situation. The same situation with our two characters from above: posing for a nice photo, they are acting excessive and they produce a nonchalant theatricality. A beautiful example of Camp. Bucharest style.
Yesterday morning we watched an Iranian movie, Father (Pedar), directed by Majid Majidi in 1996. Looking around on the net afterwards I was surprised to only find positive and extremely praising reviews, since my experience of the movie was quite the opposite. The story is set in contemporary (I guess) Iran, and the overtly Oedipal plot revolves around14-year old Mehrollah who goes away to work in order to support his widowed mother and three sisters, only to find her hastily remarried to the local policeman upon his return. Unwilling to accept the new man in his mother’s life as a father, in fact, unwilling to accept a man other than himself in his mother’s life, he unrelentlessly goes about harassing her and the new husband, with male ego outbursts that the director seems to admire as heroic, but that end up being pretty annoying for the spectator who does not have much investment in patriarchy. The storyline doesn`t have much else going for itself, it`s a back and forth between the policeman and Mehrollah`s masculinities, climaxing with the boy managing to steal the policeman`s gun (his gun, get it?) and making a run for it.In the end, quite predictably, the two are brought together by their constant chase and the cheesy ending suggests that Mehrollah will finally be able to accept the policeman as a father figure.
Now, this movie could have been done in a way that is actually meaningful and interesting, given that the theme offers a lot of room for giving depth to the characters and their circumstances. However this movie is made from a normative male perspective, anchoring itself in its biases and conditions uncritically, and presenting them to us as if they were universal values we should understand and sympathize with. Why should I be moved by a deeply patriarchal story in which the crisis is triggered by the absence of the father (an absent presence metaphorically, and literally in the photo that the boy is sporting around) and is solved by finding another male to fill in this position? The character of the mother is completely subdued, she is given very few articulate lines (her token appearances are marked by gasps, cries and tears), and seems to exist only as a pretext for more male existential angst . To be fair, the mother is not presented without a certain degree of condescending compassion, but her gestures and feelings are not conferred with the heroic, tragic dimension that her sons` are. For whom, of course, the challenge is even greater now that she is married to the representative of a very phallic institution, the police, that requires Mehrollah to bring out the big guns of his alpha male kit. In the end, it seems to me that this is movie is a game of whose dick is bigger, an obsession that is apparently not restricted to Western patriarchy.
Elena pointed me this short notice on feministing.com so I've done a little research.
So, who is actually The Rapeman? on imdb.com at the trivia section we find out that the cartoons are based on "humorous Japanese manga (comic book) series, written by KeikoAisaki, a woman." Like that can justify its content or make the male viewers safer in their pleasure of watching some nice rape scenes. It appeared from 1985 to 1992 in 13 volumes. Exploring its good marketability, Pink Pineapple produced nine Rapeman live action feature films between 1993 and 1996 and it was rapidly transformed into a cult manga/film fetish in the US.
The Rapeman is a classic super hero with a twist: a shy high school teacher by day he does "great justice" by night and of course has a motto: "Righting wrongs through penetration". His cases are solved by one method in making justice - rape and the "villains" are, picking randomly, a gold digger girlfriend, a boyfriend stealer, a lesbian wife, etc. Even more outrageous, if in the middle of a rape scene, the woman becomes unresponsive or expresses enjoyment, he uses special techniques such as "M69 Screwdriver" or "Infinite Loop" to apply more pain to the villain.
I was surprised to see after a quick search that all information that I could find is presenting the character in a positive light (except the feminist page from where I've started which doesn't say much after all). What for me is ultimately wrong, not having any doubt about it, it is read in a most sincere misogynistic way possible as fun and even ethical. As one guy says "once you get past that whole raping women thing he’s actually a really good guy." That is exactly the issue, how can you pass the "raping women thing"? Considered by its fans more like an intelligent twist on the classic superhero boring narration: " Only in Japan would this type of production be made - and thank God for it. RAPEMAN is a strangely fun and "charming" super-hero" mentioning again that the rape is always done for a good cause. One negative point noted by another reviewer: "Hard-core sleaze fans will probably be disappointed as RAPEMAN isn't nearly as "rough" as some of the older pinku material, but there is some nudity - and there's something that's hard to nail-down that makes this one a big winner in my book. I think the combination of light comedy and strange concept works..." or can it be that straight forward misogyny is simply entertaining? Another guy: "The plot of "Rapeman" may sound offensive for some viewers...In fact it's surprisingly funny and humorous. A perfect flick to cheer somebody up!" Somebody, anybody? If you are a rapist, i guess this is some really good fun. Rapeman has the effect of even changing the whole concept of rape, you might become rape friendly after watching it: "Most people find the subject of rape a very strong, criminal and evil part of life. And they have every right to believe that way. Then there are other people who think rape can be used as a means of justice, a way to avenge rights and honor. Well, before this movie I always thought Rape was a weird touchy subject. Obviously there's some whacked out nut cases out there, hurting people and families for their own sick pleasures and some of these sickos will actually commit murder. But I also believed that the act of rape can be a desirous outcome for certain people. Well, the latter is tackled somewhat in a movie I'll most likely never forget." By reinforcing some good/evil dichotomies and the cliche of punishing the evil ones, rape becomes a just method for bringing peace and order. Here is another fan: "People are getting hurt, and that is not right. Rapeman stands for justice, honor and peace. He will not stop until the bad guys get what's coming to them! The movie is believe it or not, warmhearted. It's full of humor, and has some nice sex scenes...they are actually rape scenes but they don't play out like rape. Which for me makes the movie that much better. I wouldn't be down with this if the rape scenes were reminiscent of Irreversible. It take an incredibly serious subject and makes it seem OK....for 75 minutes anyways. It's definitely one of the most enjoyable movies I've seen in a while. And I'm definitely looking forward to the sequels. Yup, that's right! 9 outta 10 for the amazing Rapeman." When rape is done for a good cause, hurray! Well, I don't really think so.
Getting lost in Kristevan abjection and thinking a lot of my own limits of the abject, I ended up with a melancholic feeling about US. Last night I had a long conversation in a Thai-Hungarian restaurant about facing other cultures and what is going on in the process. My argument was that the most difficult shocks are those when you are not foreign to the culture but you have a sort of mise-en-abyme by confronting your own lack of cultural limits. It was exactly what I felt in US: on one hand I was so familiar with everything that I saw and touched but on the other hand it was so strange and uncanny. I wasn't sure of my own subjectivity and its abject limits. Being in and out of a culture that you think you know hugely disturbs. My dear friend, Jeanne, writes here a very interesting entry on her return to Memphis. No wonder that today I had an earlier post on Burroughs' vision of America.
Yesterday I had a nasty surgery and after taking a shower I realized that my shower was full of blood, the white tiles on the floor also. During cleaning the long blood lines in a very meticulous way I realized that this is how the scene from Psycho looked like if it was not black and white. And then I realized that this memory becoming so real to the point of embodying it, put on the same level the killer and the victim. What if Norman Bates actually killed his mother and he was impersonating the mother at the same time? How that cleaning of the bathroom would have looked like? Probably like mine
I woke up this morning with one of the most weird dreams about a performance. It was something related to Salome by Oscar Wilde, a play I haven't thought about it for a while. Salome was played by an actress that i've worked with before, i won't tell her name for superstition :) I haven't seen anything of the show, just setting up the stage and trying to rehearse a bit, fixing the lights and so on. The location was important: it was set up in a Turkish bath, something similar to RudasFurdo, but bigger, with some stone stairs in the middle of the main pool. The stairs were 5-6 meters high and they were old, shaking and falling. We were struggling to rehearse but the stairs were keep falling, we couldn't find the right ones to use. It was a relocation of an already made performance but the new elements, the water from the bath and the shaky stairs were changing the story and I was thinking how can I deal with it to support my own staging. I still don't know how this staging was made but it was connected strangely enough to Hedda Gabler. My hysterical ghosts again...
Image: I, Not I by Micky Donnelly, oil on canvas, 2006 Last week I went to Cluj for an amazing conference called "Action Research and Feminism." There were two presentations that I gave, one of them being connected to my staging of Beckett's Not I, part of Silent as the Grave show. Here is what I had to say:
In Not I from 1972, a woman's mouth is isolated on the stage, locked in place with the rest of her face and body shrouded in darkness. She is identified only as "Mouth." Through a torrential stream of monologue, we discover that the woman – nearing seventy years of age, possibly even dying – has remained silent most of her life, since being thrust prematurely into the world. Her sudden flood of language is a manifestation of the "buzzing" in her head, an almost involuntary act, an autobiographical stream of babelogue with the "half the vowels wrong." Significantly, she refuses to adopt the first-person pronoun, insisting on referring to the subject of her story as "she". Like many of Beckett's characters, Mouth's hysterical need for acting out, keep talking defers the act of self-identification, the awareness of "I" that denotes accountability among the ruins of a fallen world.
Whereas Krapp's taping is accumulative and entirely self-focussed, Mouth is continually revising her narrative, the perfect or ideal form of which would omit her altogether. When her "vehement refusal to relinquish third person" suffers from a moment of confusion, she cries out, "no! . . she! . ."
Mouth becomes invested with an almost hallucinatory sense of intensity and carnality; her flickering movements the living synecdoche for an absent body. The longer we watch (and listen to) Mouth talk, laugh, and scream, the more we perceive other bodily elements as well, from the opening of the eye to the clenching of the fist. Like ghostly overtones to live music, these almost subliminal transformations arise from the interplay of material and instrument, and in Not I Beckett achieves a remarkable collusion of speech and form. Mouth is intimately connected to the words spewing forth: her very contours and motions subordinated to the demands of articulation, she provides a physical embodiment of language. To fall silent – to shut, to close up – would seem a kind of suicide, further underlining that Beckettian compulsion to break the silence with a constant stream of language, despite the futility of communicating anything meaningful.
Performing the part of Mouth is a real challenge: besides having to deliver a winding monologue whose pacing is everything, the actress must endure the physical discomfort of being literally locked in place, including a head restraint, so that only her mouth remains always visible. Body on stage becomes present through absence of the whole body, we can see and hear only the mouth. Actress’s absent body expresses lively concreteness and escapes becoming a “representable object… for the abstractive gaze” of the spectator. Hugh Kenner has suggested that Beckett may be recalling one of the unusual conditions to the license granted to Ireland's Abbey Theatre in 1904: besides being prohibited from staging exhibitions of wild beasts, the managers were not "to allow women or children to be hung from the flies or fixed in positions from which they cannot release themselves." When the play premiered in New York, Jessica Tandy was puzzled and asked Beckett whether the woman had been raped in the field. Beckett was startled: "How could you think of such a thing!" There is no need to invent external incidents to justify, as it were, Mouth's dilemma. Existence is trauma enough, and a narrative can be a consolation only in the form of disappointment.
The too many contrasting views on Beckett, on the effect and functioning of his plays in theatrical contexts, were provoked also by two burning issues that he explores in what he calls the “stage texts”: spectatorial gaze and gender issues. His plays and their theatrical interpretations still generate heated debates, especially on the grounds of their poststructuralist complexity and their feminist potential. Beckett raised difficult questions about gender relations, social conditions and dilemmas facing women, disability, age, affectivity and lack of affectivity. He never provided any answers, he didn’t give any hints how spectators should live their lives. He did not proposed political actions, policies or social measures. But these plays have a potential to inspire social change and to challenge us nowadays. Beckett’s plays bring new perspectives to feminist issues today and present contrasting views on inequality.
Adrienne Rich used the concept of re-vision to symbolize the act of looking back at old texts from new critical directions by raising fresh questions. According to her, re-vision is for feminists “more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.” Through re-vision we can look at Beckett’s texts for a way to broaden horizons, rewrite, reinterpret, criticize and restage them. Many interpretations of Beckett are put on stage everyday but Beckett’s potential is still to be rediscovered. By using the easiest strategy to relate to his characters, stage situations and his clichés nowadays we just rely on the values that we already agreed on. Each time a superficial canonized staging of Beckett is done by well-meaning actors, directors and producers another nail is hammered into his theatrical coffin. That won’t be problematic if these performances won’t overshadow outstanding elements in his plays and a strong critical voice. By seeing Beckett as a tool for social change an uncomfortable question has to be asked: is Beckett actually the finest tool for questioning inequality and patriarchy? Or would it be better to leave this task to human rights organizations, the UN, academics or feminists? Can we actually revision his characters as relevant mouthpieces for feminist slogans? Re-vision contributes to feminist epistemologies and critique of surrounding inequality; it offers a confirmation that the world around us can be changed. Re-visioning Beckett offers new types of subjectivities and new theoretical frameworks. According to Rich, re-vision is an inevitably collective action and can establish new frameworks in understanding reality.
The Mouth is not only a simple I, because she is directly and intimately related to her being as she, alongside other women into this world. There is a continuum in a not-I-but-she-centered vision of the world: her subjectivity is attached to other women. Following Braidotti and contrary to Lacan, her ex-centricity vis-à-vis the system of representation points to another logic, another way of making sense: the-she-in-I is not silent, she is part of a symbolic referential system by and of women. She is not stepping out of patriarchy, she does not escape its logic, she uses language not as a spatial structure that can be avoided or bypassed but in process within it. There is a project in Beckett’s play of defining the content of she-in-I by disengaging the traps of a constructed feminine in the sense of a dark continent or femininity as masquerade. She-not-I grows in relation to other shes, an attempt of redefining the subject. Being-she becomes an ontological precondition for a conscious becoming of the subject: getting back to Rich, one has to start with the body and the bodily roots of subjectivity, or at least with a mouth, I would add.
And this is exactly the point where feminism comes in via Braidotti: its values cannot be reduced to yet another theory – a dogma for general consumption. Feminism plays with women’s ontological desire to be women subjects: to transcend the traditional vision of subjectivity as gender-free, to inscribe the subject back into her corporeal reality which in our case starts with a mouth. Beckett’s play gets involved in the feminist theoretical project exactly at this point, as an attempt of redefining a corporeal subjectivity.
Beckett’s play rests on the same historical negation as feminist theory: disqualification and exclusion of women and their experiences. The next move after acknowledging the denigration is a discursive leap towards a redefinition of women through feminism as a movement of thought and action. But to make any sense at all of this redefinition of subjectivity and corporeality a political practice and collective acting out is required. Only at this level, re-vision can function as offering new frameworks in understanding reality. By moving it from page to stage, Beckett’s text puts into question the theatrical frame, and the body staged within it. It becomes exemplary of the critical operations of certain feminist performance practice, especially the theatrical project proposed by Helene Cixous. The reframing of Becket’s text focuses on the hysterical refusal to enter the patriarchal Oedipal discourse. Mouth’s anxiety to "get the story straight" is particularly intense because its inability to give complete and logical accounts; like a hysterical narrative it is full of gaps and blockages. Not I plays with a spiral of identifications, where the interference effect of multiple voices undermines a search for the narrative referent and announces a multitude of referents, going further to the spectator in a performing situation. This play follows Cixous’ theatrical proposal of “going beyond the confines of the stage,” in an excessive break with narrative closure. The Mouth is the paradigm of a theatrical gesture that disrupts the realist narrative and deferral the reinscription of the dominant discourse. Her desire goes beyond a realist representation which can silence her, fragmenting identification processes and coherent unified identities. The spectator is forced to face difficulty in identification with possible characters through an effort towards “the instability of the text’s point of address…insisting on performance as address” because here we have also the missing body which cannot be entirely given over to spectacle. Paradoxically, Not I is first of all a potential single gesture a la Cixous: “a single gesture is enough, but one that can transform the world.”
I am interested how artists explore their secret practice on their blogs and how they write about the process behind the curtain. Because somehow this blog is a fascinating exercise for me which i do not understand completely. What I know is that it brings satisfaction by pinning down important bits-and-pieces of my every-day-life which i encounter and which are worth to talk about and most of all, my theatrical explorations . To my surprise, the blogosphere is full of directors and actors that are exploring their stage practice online. But the most extreme act so-far is made by The Ontological-Hysteric Theatre in New York (the name is not an accident for this type of exposure!). They are rehearsing a new show, Astronome – A Night at the Opera and the rehearsals are streamed online until the show opens. Of course, bloggers were excited by the project (in US at least), one guy puts it very simple: "Watch Foreman, his cast and his crew create a new work before your very eyes. You want the theatrical process available through the internet, you've got it."
But what is behind this Ontological-Hysteric Theatre? Well, it was founded in 1968 by Richard Forman. He explained later how he started: "They were normal bourgeois theater, domestic triangle situations. That's why I called my theater "Ontological-Hysteric," because the basic syndrome controlling the structure was a classical, boulevard comedy syndrome, which I took to be hysteric in its roots." The Ontological-Hysteric Theater puts together elements of the performative, auditory and visual arts, philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature for an unusual theatrical mix thrown on stage. They engage openly with what John Keats famously described as “negative capability” (or what i would call the creative element of hysteria) - i.e. "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." He seeks to make work that unsettles and disorients received ideas and opens the doors for alternative models of perception, organization, and understanding. From their webpage I found out that in 2005 Foreman began a second chapter in his work with the introduction of the digital video and film media as dominating forces in his redefinition of ontologically hysteric theater. But back to blogs about rehearsals: one of the most interesting examples is the Hey Mathew blog, which goes into very intimate details of the rehearsal process of a new show. For me, rehearsals are the most private element of the staging process, I don't like people around when we start them and I rarely talk about them to externals. But on the other hand I am very interested in what is going to change in the staging process if you make it very transparent and like the New York theatre you open it to basically everyone in the world. What can be the effects on the performance? What are the effects on future spectators, actors and the director? Chris Wilkinson's article suspects these new methods of being just another marketing tool. By not ignoring the commercial aspect of opening the rehearsal room, there are also other external reasons for these methods. One of them is survival and I can give one example: during state socialist Romania strong censorship was making uncertain any performance that had a political perspective. Because censors were usually stopping the performance before the premiere one mechanism of making it work for some audience was to have open rehearsals for as long as possible. That affected the staging process of course. A direct effect of opening the sacred space of rehearsals for public can be the subversion of director's authority and old-school dictatorship, so popular in Eastern Europe theatre at least. But on the other hand, it can work or not work from project to project and from company to company. Actors are very important at this point: if they see it as a form of agency and creative booster in the creative process and relation to the director. If they get scared and don't feel like working at all with a webcam transmitting live nearby, it can be a huge mess. Personally, I would try it at some point, depending on the team and also on the concept of the performance. If the full opened rehearsal can become part of the main concept for the show it would be great. I am reflecting on the idea of such a project.
Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde is one of the goriest Hammer production. Set in a Victorian London with all the right ingredients including thick fog and English accent, the story goes in a very interesting direction.
We can understand the whole thing as a sexual difference story: Dr. Jekyll is a pheminst (a term introduced by Braidotti to name men interested in feminist discourse, being fascinated, puzzled and intimidated by feminist writing. They get in the discoursive game with a perversily provocative purpose: to claim the phalus once more, this time from within the feminist discourse.) This movie shows exactly this dark side of exploring sexual difference in order to "understand" women and to see "what is a woman".
In order to find an answer to his scientific research of what is a woman and what makes her immortal, in order to become immortal himself, Dr. Jekyll gets involved in some "queer business, sergeant - very queer."
His scientific interest in what makes sexual difference takes place in a very empirical way: he manages to find in his subjectivity something more than his subjectivity itself, a strange body at its very center: "Put a woman in your life and one day… you'll wake up and look in the mirror and see a changed man!" This is exactly the Lacanianextimacy, the stranger as an expression of the innermost intimacy (a woman in Dr Jekyll's case) or the Freudian das Ding. Dr Jekyll moves around the thing that is "in itself more than itself." The distance between the subject and das Ding is needed because as Zizek says das Ding is "too hot to be approached closely" and because of getting too close to das Ding "love for the neighbour necessarily turns into destructive hatred." Das Ding is not universal and has a particular place in the life of the subject and in Dr Jekyll's case appears from his interest in exploring and reinforcing a fixed dichotomous sexual difference from a clear masculine positionality. His interest in femininity and its secret for immortality, the object petit a, that is never shown on screen but its extraction is fatal, brings the horror and death of female characters. Getting back to Lacan, the motto for this movie can be: "I love you, but there is in you something more than you, object petit a, which is why I mutilate you."
One obsessive line appear in this movie:"You've got to do bad to do good, ain't ya?" But what does it mean? Even if it seems a simple horror B movie unimportant part of bad dialogue, it's meaning can move us further in the main argument: it is exactly the Lacanian thesis that Good is only the mask of a radical absolute Evil. This mask is "the indecent obsession by das Ding, the atrocious, obscene Thing." (Zizek) Good is just another name for Bad, a Bad with no particular, pathological status. Das Ding becomes indecently present, obsessive, a traumatic body, making Dr. Jekyll free from a pathological attachment to a particular worldly sexual difference that he imposes on his understanding of the world. Good is only a way of keeping a distance towards the evil Thing, a distance that makes it bearable. This particular distance is broken in this story.
What can I say after watching this movie, besides a personal increase of attention on deep obssesions and hidden das Dings, is just beware pheminists working on sexual difference, you never know when they might kill.
