Femme Fantastic

In Peggy Ahwesh’s The Dead Man, the beauty of female sexual desire is explored in all its complexity without the usual pornographic glossing. The heroine explores her sexual desire without the restrictive gaze of profit and patriarchal satisfaction. All of the films in Femme Fantastic free carnal desire from this gaze. In doing so, they open up a space for evaluating the layers of sexual representation as well as the emotional and physical aspects of unrepressed carnal desire.

Ahwesh's Nocturne begins with the dragging of a nude, unconscious male body. The tactility of the naked flesh struggling against soil is comparable to the images of palpability in MM Serra's Bitch Beauty, when the heroine's sexual catharsis is conveyed through physical images of bodily peril and renewal. Bauer's Crystallus plays with palpability as well. A woman drenches herself in red liquid. The solidifying, penetrating, crystallized forms that emerge throughout the film, perhaps relating to this red liquid, show how tactility becomes an effective way of expressing carnal desire.