Swollen Stigma / Cast1998

SWOLLEN STIGMA (1998) 16mm col, sound, 20 min- 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 finger 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. CAST (2000) 16mm b&w, sound, 17min- 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. It's structure, instead is akin to that of dreams where different scenic spaces collapse and the inanimate and animate interchange. Wide-angled perspectives, shifting point of view and juxtapositions of sound and silence force inner and outer realities to collide, creating a unsettling psychic world.