S.O.S. EXTRATERRESTRIA
Mara Mattuschka, Austria, short film, 1993, 35mm, bw, 10'
"The world as a plaything for a giantess from outer space. A Godzilla-imitation on the way to herself: a giantess from outer space in the streets of a big city, fooling around, producing destruction, copulating with the Eiffel Tower. An orchestra of big feelings, melodrama, defamed by infantile sounds and absurd costume, in make-up-persiflage and grotesque body-art performances. E.T. staggers through the night & the City, looks like Mimi Minus, and grabs little projected human beings with her hand, just like the huge infatuated ape of the horror genre. And the cinema of war and catastrophies watches with open mouth, until a toy city - which desperately tries to be a real one - finally collapses laconically."
(Stefan Grissemann, www.filmvideo.at)
BORN IN FLAMES
Lizzie Borden, USA, 1983, beta SP, colour; 80'
Born in Flames is a comic fantasy of female rebellion set in the near future. The film looks at the rights of women under a socialist society in the USA - and finds nothing has changed. When the black radical founder of the Women's Army is mysteriously killed, a seemingly impossible coalition of women - across all lines of race, class, and sexual preference - emerges to blow the System apart.
Born in Flames establishes a kaleidoscope, a multi-voiced texture of seemingly contradictory women's perspectives, including the Women's Army's political militants, activists from underground radio stations, black women (many of whom are reluctant to embrace feminism), lesbians (many of whom are women of color), middle-class white journalists, leftists, punks, housewives, and trades unionists. The film was a collaborative process in which the actors, among them Kathryn Bigelow, many of whom were grass roots feminists, played themselves. "Borden attempts to cinematically map the slogan 'the personal is political' in all of its contradictory meanings.(...) The strength of Born in Flames - its radical aesthetic quality - relies on compelling editing techniques. Borden's gritty, pseudo-documentary style presents a disjunctive collage of women's individual and collective work." (Christina Lane, Feminist Hollywood)
SCI-FI FILM CYCLE
Curated by: Laurence Rassel, Constant vzw, Brussels
"A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility." (D. Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto)
If a cyborg is not born in a garden, neither is this program. Born in a basement where tapes have been kept for 7 years now, it is a program body put together by different minds as we followed our experiences, hearts, chance and irony to build it. This construct of movies is a possibility, one of many to put together a partial selection of experimental feminist science-fiction movies, made by women, that you might not have seen yet.
But what do we mean by science-fiction?
We see it as a reconstructed body, as a trans-genre, trans-disciplinary science. As a post-apocalyptic tabula rasa which will allow the passport-less, the Others, to weave other social fabrics than those of the capitalist market, a chance to freely imagine relations not based on domination.
A body, and a genre (gender?), as the result of a scientific, individual, collective process, the body emerging from thought, constructed by thought or by experience. That body can have multiple relations with spaces and other bodies through multiple extensions. The journey through those bodies and spaces challenges the notion of the individual identities that take the risk of otherness/heterogeneity somewhere between science and fiction.
But we won't be spared having to situate this (social) body in a given territory: border zones, zones to be defined or explored, enclosed areas, dumping grounds, war zones, media zones…Because this science fiction is also the story of territories and individuals crossed by flows, communities, colonies, politics, by what will be private and public.
Science fiction as a construction, as a hotchpotch of imagination and reality, an association of utopia and dystopia, of flesh and the machine, a body issued from the mind as an alternative to the domination of the market. Science-fiction as a figure of speech, stylization, a scientific process. Intrusion, discrepancy, incongruity as a system of resistance.
Science-fiction is thought as a strategy for transformation and reflection, rather than the beginning or the end of inflexible truths.
Laurence Rassel
