Swollen Stigma

Swollen Stigma

1998 · 20 min · ★ 6.0 · Fantasy

Swollen Stigma nourishes the fantasy of its protagonist’s inner life and proposes a lesbian imaginary which takes leap into risk and displacement. The film opens with an entranced seated woman working her fingers through a single strand of hair and proceeds to explore her lived imaginary in which desire and fear interlace. She re-visions different moments in time which are haunted by an absent lover. Like a playful fairy princess, this lover appears upside down in an armchair, hanging legs-down from the ceiling, playing dead on the floor, or eating roses; her body continuously permeates the woman’s reality. The film’s shifting points of view jump between the protagonist, fantasy spaces and her lover, making an internal world leak into what is external with the fluidity of blood into water.

Directed by Sarah Pucill

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Cast

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Swollen Stigma

Animaniacs: Wakko's Wish

A close match in mood and era.

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Stages of Mourning

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Mirrored Measure

Mirrored Measure · 1996

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Mirrored Measure features two women separated by a generation. The older woman ceremoniously lays a table – she repeatedly spreads a cloth and smoothes it out. The table is set and glasses and jug filled with water. A balanced and controlled ritual follows in which the jug is passed round and water is repeatedly sipped. Water becomes the lens through which we see and the medium through which the protagonists connect. The sense of connectivity is abruptly severed when the first glass tumbles.

Phantom Rhapsody

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Distinctive in its stark use of black and white and reminiscent of early silent cinema, this film is composed of a series of theatrical side-show ‘magic’ acts. Three women stage tricks of appearance and disappearance, punctuated by trumpet, cello and drums.Interchanging between the roles of magician, nude and filmmaker, they perform the preparation of an image and the prepared or completed image, drawing on iconic paintings

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In Backcomb the demonic is unleashed on domestic space. It takes the form of two of femininity’s mildest tokens, hair and embroidery, that serve here in the creation of a sexualised surrealist experience. Within the claustrophobic space of a table-lay, a forceful and erectile mass of hair comes alive and slithers across its surface. The hair probes into vessels and punches through the cloth till finally order overturns and all smashes to the ground.

Cast

Cast creates a claustrophobic and haunting space where people and things invade worlds in which they do not normally belong. Lifeless dolls are heaped inside drawers, dolled-up life size figures lie motionless on a windy beach at the water’s edge; a chair rocks in an empty room, a mirror reflects and observes, and a chest of drawers is caressed by the sea. The film has a dramatic sensibility that sets up a false promise of narrative. Its structure, instead, is akin to that of dreams where different scenic spaces collapse and the inanimate and animate interchange. Wide-angled perspectives, shifting points of view and juxtapositions of sound and silence force inner and outer realities to collide, creating an unsettling psychic world.

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In this film an interior landscape is scrutinised, and an apparent rational calm is revealed as suffocating. Milk and Glass is an evocative journey from surface to interior – a black-coated mirror, the hollow of a bowl, a cavernous throat; a brush demarcates a line of lip on a flat surface, a mouth doubles up with the bowl and is virtually spoon-fed till it chokes.

Fall In Frame

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In Fall in Frame the materiality of the filmmaking process is explored within a constrained performance that blurs the split between the physical and consciousness. The film ends where it starts with the sheet around the camera, shutting out the image.

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