Inappropriate Bodies: Contemporary Filmmakers Challenging Gender Constructions through Appropriation

by Jaimie Baron


Speechless, Scott Stark, 2008

Found footage filmmaking has long been a method that filmmakers have used to critique media images or to pay homage to them–or sometimes both simultaneously. Well-known filmmakers like Abigail Child, Su Friedrich, William E. Jones, Chick Strand, and Leslie Thornton, among others, have appropriated images in the service, at least in part, of challenging the audience to rethink the gender constructions posited by the mainstream media. While the use of found footage goes back almost to the beginning of film history, there is now a rising generation of filmmakers using appropriated images to further deconstruct and reconstruct the gender roles established by Classical Hollywood films, television commercials, medical textbooks, pornography, and other institutions of power.

In January 2009, I founded the Festival of (In)appropriation, which is an experimental found footage festival that will likely be held annually from now on, due to the wealth of materials sent in response to the call and to the strong audience turnout for the first event, which was held in June 2009. The only parameters in the call for entries were that works submitted had to have been made in the past four years, be twenty minutes or less, and include at least some appropriated material. My fellow curator Andrew Hall and I received over 120 entries from all over the world. While Andrew and I chose a group of about 25 films that we thought were particularly “good” or “original” based on our subjective sense of aesthetic judgment for the Festival of (In)appropriation, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to examine a different cross section of the films based on a different set of parameters. As we watched these 120 films, we noticed that many of them raised questions about or adjacent to issues of gender and the body. In collaboration with the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and the program in Cinema and Media Studies in the UCLA Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media, I decided to create an entirely different program of films from the same entries, the screening of which was held on December 7, 2009.


I Love (Hate) You: Gloria, Kate Raney, 2007

One theme that emerged from this new cross section of films is an ambivalent fascination with female stars of an earlier cinematic era. In Kate Raney’s I Love (Hate) You Gloria (2007), brief black-and-white clips from the famous films of Classical Hollywood actress Gloria Grahame are cut out and pasted over a swirling, ethereal background of green and blue. Sometimes Grahame appears alone, beautiful but isolated against the background while at other times she appears with various male co-stars, including Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place (Nicolas Ray, 1950), who alternates between caressing and attacking her. Kristy Norindr’s Nana Reedit (2008) similarly exhibits a fascination with Anna Karina, who seems to be dancing with joy in Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962) but whose appearance of happiness is undercut by Norindr, who constantly interrupts her dance.


They have a name for girls like me, Julie Perini, 2009

Anthony Hays’ Anything for My Gal (2008) produces an even more disturbing effect when he re-edits footage of Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop (Joshua Logan, 1956), creating a field in which Monroe’s body is violently stretched and distorted. Another set of films productively “misuse” images of naked bodies–primarily female–derived from pornography and from medical sources. In Marnie Parrell’s About Town (2007), Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez’s XXX (2007), and Scott Stark’s Speechless (2008), such images are taken out of their accepted context so that they become strange, shocking, and sometimes funny. In About Town, Parrell appropriates images from many different heterosexual pornographic films all shot in the same Los Angeles house and transforms it through voiceover into a fake real estate advertisement. Hilariously, the narration completely ignores the sexual acts being performed onscreen.


XXX, Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez, 2007

Rodriguez’s XXX takes pornographic footage and manipulates it through hand-processing, painting over the footage, and creating a three-screen triptych of porn in which the images suddenly take on an artisanal quality that undermines their function as purely utilitarian sexual stimulants. And Stark’s Speechless appropriates close-up stereoscopic Viewmaster images of female genitalia from a 1976 medical textbook called The Clitoris, “animating” the vulvae by switching back and forth between the two stereoscopic images, and combining these images with patterns found in nature. Interestingly, none of these films engage in an overt critique of their original sources, but, rather, they all exhibit a desire to hyperbolize such images so that they transgress the “rules” of how images of nude bodies and genitals are “supposed” to be consumed.

Two other films focus a critical eye on heterosexual masculinity. Ann Steuernagel’s Pledge (2006) combines footage of young boys, smiling shyly or playing together, with footage of men doing “manly” things–for instance, building a house, marching in military formation, or shooting a missile–suggesting that a particular set of actions has already been prescribed for these boys. Stuernagel’s use of reverse motion, however, also suggests that this process of masculine indoctrination has the potential to be undone. In a similar vein, Elisa Kreisinger’s I Am Man (2008) uses footage from a Burger King commercial in which men sing a song about eating like men which means eating meat and not “chick food.” Kreisinger uses some of the original footage from the commercial but adds militaristic and phallic imagery that defamiliarizes the commercial so that it becomes an advertisement for violence rather than food. Rodriguez’s Is It True Blondes Have More Fun? (2006) similarly interrogates the way in which commercials address women, who apparently care less about eating meat and more about having beautiful hair.

Along with Parrell’s About Town (2006), Brandon Downing’s The Ship (2009) and Julie Perini’s They have a name for girls like me (2009) both exhibit a humorous approach toward language in relation to gendered images. In The Ship, Downing takes a song from a Bollywood film and lays it over images of a scuba diver, adding his own subtitles that sound like the Hindi words being sung, “interpreting” them to make them, and thereby the images that accompany them, seem pornographic. In order to construct her film, Perini appropriates materials from films in which a character named “Julie” appears, preserving only the clips in which someone says the word “Julie.” In each of these two films, the filmmaker “misinterprets” language in order to poke fun at the original sources, Perini’s in order to trace the life of a name and Downing’s in order to show how seemingly nonsexual sounds and images can be transformed by the written word.


The Garden of Life, Nada Gordon, 2009

Nada Gordon’s The Garden of Life (2009) also uses subtitles (she and Downing are both part of the Flarf Collective) but focuses primarily on images of women from across the world dancing for the camera. She and Perini both make appropriation films through the method of “collecting” certain kinds of footage in order to reveal particular (gendered) tendencies. Agnes Moon’s Dream of Me (2007) and Sasha Waters Freyer’s Her Heart is Washed in Water and Then Weighed (2006) meditate on what it means to be a mother, a wife, or a sister. In Moon’s film, images of newspapers scanning by on microfilm and footage of a girl ice skating are overlaid with voiceovers of different women talking about the film subject identified as “you” who was adopted. In this case, the bodies of “you” (who may or may not be the filmmaker) and her (lost) biological sister are absent from the film despite being its central subject. In Freyer’s film, a story about her mother’s lack of fulfillment as a housewife is intercut with images of an autopsy, indirectly linking her mother’s feeling that her labors were taken for granted to the medical objectification and depersonalization of a dead body. Both films are grounded in the desire of others to know a woman, but, in each, a gap is opened between a female subject’s identity and the material manifestation of that identity,the body–suggesting that she is ultimately unknowable.


Her Heart is Washed in Water and then Weighed, Sasha Waters Freyer, 2006

Like Freyer’s film, Akosua Adoma Owusu’s Intermittent Delight (2006) reflects on women’s labor, combining footage of African women weaving textiles with footage from 1950s American advertisements for printed patterns for decorating your refrigerator, aimed at (white) housewives. Owusu’s film traces the similarities and differences between patterned objects as they are made and used across space and time.

While these films constitute only a small sample of the approaches to gender and the body that are being employed by contemporary found footage filmmakers, they nevertheless reveal a certain set of concerns surrounding the gendered body. I suggest that the key trope is, in fact, ambivalence: toward the female stars of Classical Hollywood, toward pornographic and medical images of the body, toward militaristic and carnivorous constructions of masculinity, and so on. To appropriate is often to critique but, as is the case in many forms of ironic and parodic play, such appropriations also repeat and thereby risk reinforcing aspects of the dominant paradigm. Nevertheless, appropriation always has the potential to destabilize meaning itself and, at least in the case of the films discussed above, to encourage us to misread the gender cues that constantly tell us what it means to be a man or a woman.


Jaimie Baron is a Ph.D. candidate in the Cinema and Media Studies Program in the Department of Film. Television and Digital Media at UCLA.

Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez at Sleepless Night

Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez will be presenting two moving image installations entitled "o Amor" and "Ephemera" at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden to celebrate Sleepless Night on the evening of November 7, 2009 from about 7pm until daybreak the following morning.

Working with hand-crafted found and recycled film footage, Rodriguez orchestrates transparent realities from fragments of photographs and films.

"O Amor" is a video journey into the subconscious secrets of the Botanical Garden itself. Filmed at this very site, "o Amor" is a giant video projection addressing the cycle of bloom and decay in both the natural environment and the experience of love, looped and screened outdoors through the main window of the Garden's Administrative Offices.

"Ephemera" consists of miniscule transparent images suspended from the branches of the Grand Poinciana tree at the entrance to the Botanical Garden. This 3-D collage will be rendered kinetic by the natural breezes blowing through the outdoor environment, and the projection achieved through the use of spotlights at the base of the tree.

Dancers from Momentum Dance Company will perform an interactive piece in collaboration with this installation, choreographed by Delma Iles. Performance at midnight.

Abstract Film Palimpsests

On the Work of Rey Parla

pa·limp·sest: n., Writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased; something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface (Webster's)



By Michael Betancourt

Each of the three abstract films hand-painted by Rey Parla take their form from (and owe much of their meaning to) their origins in the form and procedures of aerosol art, where each new writer adds and overlays their imagery and marks onto surfaces that have a history of past marks already there, giving both "graffiti" and his hand-painted films a clear basis in the palimpsest. These films are a document of the process of their own creation. While three films are available for viewing, he produced more than the three films that exist; his earliest films were short loops of marks and layering added to super-8 documentary footage of "graffiti writers" at work in Miami, Florida. These first hand-painted film loops did not survive precisely because each was a collection of experiments. Parla was testing his approach to creating abstract film imagery analogous to aerosol graffiti art. These loops would coalesce into his first finished film, Sporadic Germination — some of his experimental loops are included in his first completed film. Parla's concerns with history and aerosol art as both the subject and the product of his films separates his work from that of other artists making hand-painted abstract films. History and its relationship to Parla, the working film artist, is a recurring issue of his films.

Sporadic Germination announces itself as a graffiti film at the beginning of the film. The title itself appears letter-by-letter as spray painted letters in the immediately recognizable cursive alphabet of graffiti. Much of the film includes faded images of actual Miami graffiti paintings; also known as "pieces," at unidentified and abandoned construction sites already overlaid, obscured, and re-written by the physical marks left by past writers. This visual content is often itself heavily obscured by Parla's own painting:

While editing [a documentary on graffiti writing in Miami called] "An Experimental Segmented Reality," my brother [Jose Parla, the subject of the film] sat next to me to draw in his black book and wait to see what the projector would spit out. He had with him a bag full of designer markers, tools and paint. Using some left over footage, I recalled from a reading that Georges Méliès has used a colorization method to bleach an entire film with a sepia like look. My experiments with color on photographed film began on this work and later experiments developed out of discarded footage which ended up being a part of Sporadic Germination.1

These photographic images are deeply embedded in the graphic patterns of scratches and paint marks that fill the frame and cover both sides of the film itself. When projected, the difference in depth of field gives the film's imagery a tangible depth and visual presence where some marks are crisply in focus while others are softened by their location on the reverse side of the film strip. The sheer number and complexity of marks and scratches is impressive given the small gauge of the actual celluloid.


The gradual emergence of this first finished film from the accumulation of both marks and scratches on the film and the accretion of successful loops combined with new footage prepared specifically for it is reflected in its title, Sporadic Germination. This film results from Parla's discovery that he could paint the film and work the resulting material in a way analogous to his brother Jose's (right) work on wood that partly adapts their earlier "aerosol writing" work with mixed media into a museum/gallery format. Parla's discovery of direct animation came from his desire to create a film analog to the direct work done by his brother working with acrylic and spray-paint. His discovery was a ‘naive' one, done without an awareness of the films made by other artists such as Stan Brakhage or Len Lye.

Parla's second film The Revolution of Super 8 Universe: a self-portrait, also produced on super-8, employed a more complex, self-aware and historically conscious approach to his process. The leftover documentary footage of his first film is replaced by a still photograph of Rey Parla himself. His approach to the photographic footage in both films places the camera's image at the center of the aesthetic:

Technically I was interested in creating layers on celluloid by producing a history of mixed media with paint, spit, scratching, lines; rubbing strips together, using water and cloth and my finger nails to scratch out part of existing images so that the picture would blend seamlessly into what I was painting. It was through the juxtaposition of photography and abstraction that I began thinking about the deeper psychological layers in me and how I could dig further into the image; deeper into the frame. [...] I began to paint on super 8mm film by using the emulsion as part of my initial design. Scratching off the emulsion wasn't the goal; cropping the image was, so that I could later on create a kind of seamless frame around the image with paint and scratching.2

The contents of the photographs in the first two films are thus essential to the form and meaning of these films. The shift in photographic content between his first and second films, from documenting his brother's "aerosol pieces" at abandoned sites around Miami, to a self-portrait, reflects a shift in concern from finding a visual analog to Jose's painting to refining and identifying his own work and place in relation to the history of hand-painted films. The "revolution" of the second film is in part a discovery that his hand-painting belongs to a history and is part of an established art.


Sporadic Germination (right) premiered at the Miami International Film Festival in 1994. The other films he saw there were his first exposure to avant-garde film. 3 This encounter crystallized his approach in several regards. He produced a second film, The Revolution of Super 8 Universe: a self-portrait, and began work on a longer project in 35mm originally titled The Spectacle, but that he would release as Rumba Abstracta. The self-portrait, like the earlier Sporadic Germination, is produced on super-8 working over top of photographs. Where the images in his first film function as links between the hand-painting and manipulation of the film strip itself and the historical layering and build-up of imagery and marks on abandoned, derelict buildings in the urban environment of Miami, the embedded self-portrait (still) photograph in The Revolution of Super 8 Universe: a self-portrait is closer to the "poemagogic" use of photography identified by critic P. Adams Sitney in his discussion of Stan Brakhage's Dante Quartet. These images serve to signify psychological aspects of their creator:

In [Brakhage's] The Dante Quartet brief glimpses of an erupting volcano and craters of the moon, seen amid or under the swirls of paint, could be seen as what [Anton] Ehrenzweig [a psychologist who studied creativity] called "poemagogic images": "I have coined the term "poemagogic" to describe [the] special function of inducing and describing the ego's creativity. . . . Poemagogic images, in their enormous variety, reflect the various phases of creativity in a very direct manner, through the central theme of death and rebirth, of trapping and liberations, seems to overshadow the others.". . . In his later hand-painted films, the "poemagogic" images, allegorical of the psychodynamics of creativity, tend to disappear.4

A similar progression from photography to direct work on clear leader is visible in Parla's work, and his use of photography can be understood in similar terms. Sitney's proposal that the photographic images painted over by Brakhage should be understood in relation to the psychology of creativity, with the over-painting, scratching, and other reworking of the image standing-in as symbols for the death and rebirth Ehrenzweig believes is allegorized in all creative processes. This relationship also describes the Parla films. The images are destroyed as they are forced to become something new that incorporates the hand-made gesture. The embedding of "poemagogic" photography in Sporadic Germination and The Revolution of Super 8 Universe: a self-portrait anchor the abstractions in concrete realism, however attenuated. The photography links the abstractions to his life in direct, obvious ways: pictures of his brother's paintings; a self-portrait.

The literal destruction and transformation of his images, the palimpsest aspect of these films, is also a dramatization of Freud's allegory of the subconscious mind in the "mystic writing-pad":

If we lift the entire covering sheet — both the celluloid and the waxed paper — off the wax slab, the writing vanishes and, as I have already remarked, does not reappear again. The surface of the Mystic Pad is clear of writing and once more capable of receiving impressions. But it is easy to discover that the permanent trace of what was written is retained upon the wax slab itself [...] If we image one hand writing upon the surface of the Mystic Writing-Pad while another periodically raises its covering-sheet from the slab, we shall have a concrete representation of the way I tried to picture the functioning of the perceptual apparatus of our mind.5

Freud's description finds a literal correlate in Parla's procedure of scratching, repainting, and distressing his film strips so they accumulate marks, colors, and other traces of his process. The magic writing-pad's accumulation of marks that never vanish, instead reappearing and interacting with all the new reworkings of the surface, is identical to Parla's description of the film as a collection of "layers." This hand-painting literally becomes a personal expression of self in his second film, making it into a "mystic writing-pad" where the marks can be seen as a reflection of his mind and mental state. His connection between abstraction and internal mental states in The Revolution of Super 8 Universe: a self-portrait, rather than as a transfer of the graffiti procedure into film as in Sporadic Germination, is a direct result of his encounter with the broader traditions and forms of abstract film and abstraction in general.

The link between internal perceptions and abstraction, especially abstract film, is an integral part of the history of this art.6 The shift in emphasis from external reality to internal personal history does not alter these films' construction as palimpsests. Neither is this changed referent from external to internal as dramatic as it might appear: Sporadic Germination has a dual set of referents, both the visible appearance of "aerosol pieces" occasionally visible in the background under the network of painting and scratching, as well as the unseen aspects of a personal history in and around the aerosol art movement in Miami. Embedded in both films is a personal history that connects Parla in unseen ways to his material.


Rumba Abstracta, Parla's third abstract film, follows this same line of development. Unlike the previous films, it was produced without a photographic "substrate," instead being done directly on strips of 35mm clear leader; nearly all of the strips used were 24, 54, or 56 frames long. Originally this third film was meant to be a feature length abstract film titled The Spectacle, after Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, but when Alicia Parla (his aunt) died suddenly, he changed the title. The personal dimension is crucial in his process since it both structures the individual images and provides the contents for the films, informing their meaning beyond the networks of scratches and marks. This is the "history" that is crucial to their form as palimpsests.

The personal dimensions of these scratch films are grounded, like the graffiti procedures that form the basis of Parla's approach to paint-on-film, in the lived experiences of his personal biography. The palimpsest these films present is fundamentally a reflection of these biographical dimensions: the creation and maintenance of links between self and family presented in the form of films. At the same time, Parla's working process is automatic — a stream of consciousness7 — making the layers understandable as records of his reactions and responses to the photographic imagery and previous marks. The progression from documentary footage of his brother working, to a self-portrait that was a "revolution" since it represents a break with his past work as a documentarian, then to a film without underlying photography where any imagery and form must rely entirely upon feedback between the present work and past work demonstrates his movement into self-sufficiency. The psychological maturation process Ehrenzweig describes in the "poemagogic image" as essential to creativity becomes visible in the progression of these abstract films. Parla's palimpsest is himself — in the form of his lived experiences — and through the psychological processes dramatized literally in the gesture, scratch, and painting he puts into his hand-painted films.
Notes

1. Parla, Rey. Reflections on Personal Filmmaking, unpublished article, 8.

2. Ibid, 8-9.

3. Ibid, 10.

from Rumba Abstract4. Sitney, P. Adams. "Tales of the Tribes" in Chicago Review, 47:4, 48:1, winter 2001/spring 2002, pp. 112-113; quoting Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 176-177.

5. Freud, Sigmund. "The Mystic Writing-Pad" in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX, translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 230-232.

6. Dann, Kevin T. Bright Colors Falsely Seen (New Haven: Yale, 1998).

7. Parla, Ibid., pp. 1-2.

August 2006 | Issue 53
Copyright © 2006 by Michael Betancourt

Michael Betancourt is an avant-garde theorist, artist, and curator. Journals such as Leonardo, Semiotica, and CTheory have published his essays, he has edited books on visual music, and written one on media art titled Structuring Time: Notes on Making Movies (Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2004).

Note: Parla's Sporadic Germination can be found on the DVD Visual Music from Iota, along with work by Andrew D. Lyons, Michael Betancourt, Michael Mantra, Emile Tobenfeld, Mavie Cahn, Nancy Herman, Bill Alves, and Beth Warshafsky. Happily, it's priced at a reasonable $25 for individuals. Get it here.