Dervish 2

This first feature by Amy Greenfield brings to the screen the story of the daughter of Oedipus in an emotionally relentless, visually stunning New Music Film Opera which challenges the conventions of narrative cinema to create a genre of its own. The 2500-year-old drama of the woman who defied the state to bury her brother is transformed through stark, ceaseless movement, haunting sounds and music (including themes from Glen Branca, David Van Tieghem, Elliot Sharp and Diamanda Galas) and words of outcry against our own world's injustice.

A visual poem in which a young man and woman move from dead weight (death) to transcendent flight (rebirth) distilling the extremes of the early 1970s, from the Vietnam war to space exploration.

Female dancers “clothed” in electronically generated flaming colors reincarnate Thomas Edison’s 1894 hand-tinted film “Annabelle Dances”.

... has been used in women's studies classes on rape. Its energy is the energy of protest and of rock music. A woman is dragged and dragged through dirt with increasing violence. As the violence increases, so does the beat and intensity of the harsh, eletronic sound. The audience can identify deeply with the woman's movements and so experience the depth of this violence.–A. G. "She abandons her body entirely."–Boston Sunday Herald.

Like female artists in other forms - Carolee Schneeman, Versuchka, Charlotte Moorman- who covered their bodies with earth and paint and chocolate, Greenfield in Element reveals a femaleness both transgressive and erotic. She unites complex associations of death and birth in a visceral mud-caked performance.

My wedding gift to Robert Haller and Amy Greenfield. The publishers of the Anthology Film Archives are very happy with the making this farce.