women without men

In her feature-film debut, renowned visual artist Shirin Neshat offers an exquisitely crafted view of Iran in 1953, when a British- and American-backed coup removed the democratically elected government. Adapted from the novel by Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur, the film weaves together the stories of five individual women during those traumatic days, whose experiences are shaped by their faith and the social structures in place.

With a camera that floats effortlessly through the lives of the women and the beautiful countryside of Iran, Neshat explores the social, political, and psychological dimensions of her characters as they meet in a metaphorical garden, where they can exist and reflect while the complex intellectual and religious forces shaping their world linger in the air around them. Looking at Iran from Neshats point of view allows us to see the larger picture and realize that the human community resembles different organs of one body, created from a common essence.

SHIRIN NESHAT
Iranian-born visual artist Shirin Neshat is known for her hauntingly beautiful explorations of Islam and gender relations. Over the past 15 years, Neshat has created provocative expressions drawn on her personal experiences in exile, and on the widening political and ideological rift between the West and the Middle East. Her potent statements in still and moving images evoke the struggles that define her.

Born in Qazvin, one of the most religious cities in Iran, Shirin Neshat is perhaps the most famous contemporary artist to emerge from that country. Neshat left Iran just before the Islamic revolution (1979) and the fall of the Shah. Her consequent visits to Iran after the revolution led to the creation of a body of work which launched Neshat’s artistic career, however, since 1996 she has not been able to return to her country due to the controversial nature of her art. After receiving her degree in art from the University of California at Berkeley, Neshat moved to New York, where she continues to live and feel the pull and push of her roots. She examines her homeland from a distance, as well as in closer perspective on her travels across the Middle East.

On today’s complicated global stage, Neshat’s voice is unmistakably relevant. She first gained prominence with Women of Allah (1993-97), a series of photographs depicting women in veils carrying guns with their skin covered in Islamic poetry. These arresting images reflected Neshat’s sense of how the revolution had changed the Iran that she knew, especially the lives of women seeking freedom, rebelling in martyrdom and militancy.

By 1998, when Neshat began experimenting with film and video installations, she met Iranian artist/filmmaker, Shoja Azari. They began a collaboration which has led to numerous important video pieces such as the trilogy—Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999), and Fervor (2000)—about gender roles in the restrictive Islamic society. In the first two cinematic statements, she immersed the viewer literally in the middle of the works, which were projected on two screens, each occupied by actors of one sex. The men and women are physically separated here in art, as in real life. In Turbulent, Azari performed the role of male singer while Sussan Deyhim, was the female singer. Here Neshat explored singing as a metaphor for freedom, inspired by an Iranian ban on women singing. In Rapture, she continued her theme with a story about women moving across the desert, and how a few eventually break free to leave on a small boat. Fervor expressed the passionate yearning of a couple who can only make contact with their eyes, closing the trilogy with an emphasis on the common ground shared between the sexes.

On a more personal note, Neshat explored her own displacement in Soliloquy (1999). Again using duo projections, she places an image of herself in the Middle East on one screen, and an image of herself in the West on another, visually revealing the split between the two very different cultures that are both a part of her life.

guerilla girls

This excerpt from !Women Art Revolution introduces the Guerilla Girls, the proclaimed “conscience of the art world”, who draw attention to injustice and under-representation across artistic platforms and institutions. Several members discuss their origin story and modus operandi, including “the penis countdown”.

This film is premiering at TIFF

The Kids are NOT alright

This movie angered me to my core - what a terrible representation of lesbian families!
Here is a great review by Jack Halberstam:



In the pre-punk, post-mod anthem “The Kids Are Alright” by The Who, Roger Daltry sings about leaving domesticity behind and moving on: “Sometimes, I feel I gotta get away/Bells chime, I know I gotta get away/And I know if I don’t, I’ll go out of my mind/Better leave her behind with the kids, they’re alright/The kids are alright.”

This song has been brilliantly covered by The Queers and The Ramones among others and has become part of the powerful legacy of The Who, a rock band that created the violent and dynamic foundations for punk, emo, for The Strokes, The White Stripes and a whole host of other genre-bending bands. Given the raucous power of the song and the anti-domestic sentiment it expresses, it sets expectations high for Lisa Cholodenko’s new film by the same name, and promises to deliver us from suffocating domesticity into some other arrangement of bodies, biology and desire. No such luck!

The Kids Are Alright is a soul-crushing depiction of long-term relationships, lesbian parenting and mid-life crisis. Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are mushed into one category by their kids Laser (Josh Hutcherson) and Joni (Mia Wasikowska) who call them “moms” or “the moms.” The moms have merged into one maternal entity and although they have distinct personalities, their parenting function is depicted as one amorphous smothering gesture after another. The kids suffer through the over-parenting but crisis ensues when Laser decides to track down his sperm donor dad, Paul, played by Mark Ruffalo. Once Paul rides onto the scene on his classic black BMW motorcycle, bearing organic veggies and good wine, the cracks in the façade of lesbian domesticity appear and a rather predictable cycle of betrayal, infidelity and domestic upheaval begins.

Obvously the mise-en-scene for The Kids are Alright is rife with narrative and dramatic possibilities and the film is being hailed as a universal depiction of the travails of long-term relationships. The acting is fine and nuanced throughout and yet the film is depressing and sadly trades in stale stereotypes about lesbians in particular. While Cholodenko’s first film played against stereotype by setting its lesbian drama in a drugged out world of high-art, this film loads sexual inertia, domestic dowdiness and bourgeois complacency onto the lesbian couple and leaves the sperm donor dad in the enviable position of being free, cool and casually sexual. Early on in the film, Jules and Nic watch gay porn while making a grand effort to have sex – in this cringe-worthy scene, Jules goes under the covers to go down on Nic who keeps watching the bad porn with no particular desire. Eventually we hear the whirr of a vibrator but still there is no money shot (either in the bed or on the TV screen), no real desire between the two women and we don’t even see flesh! Cut to Paul making love to a gorgeous African American woman, one of his employees no less, with much gusto, much nakedness and free abandon. Ok, we get the picture, long-term relationships struggle with desire, short term involvements struggle with commitment. The long-term couple may not have great sex but they do have the family and togetherness, the single guy has great sex and lots of it but no one to go home to.

While the film’s moral outcome is supposed to favor the women and leave Paul out in the cold, it actually delivers, whether the film means to or not, a scathing critique of gay marriage. If the message here is “see gay marriages are just like straight ones – we all face the same problems,” then surely the outcome of the film would be the end of marriage, the desire to find other kinds of arrangements that work? But no, this film, like many a heterosexual drama that turns the family inside out only to return to it at the film’s end, shows that marriage is sexless, families turn rotten with familiarity, lesbians over parent and then it asks us to invest hope into this very arrangement.

The Kids Are Alright is beautifully acted and has moments where it gets everything right – the awkwardness between Paul and Joni and Laser, for example, at their first meeting; the anger sparked by Paul trying to step in and offer parenting advice to Nic – she responds: “I need your advice like I need a dick up my butt!” possibly the best line in the film – the irritation between Nic and Jules as they try to absorb the daddy-come-lately into their family unit. But all the acting in the world cannot save a conservative script from its own conclusions. And so, even though the film is quite good at showing how superfluous and redundant the father role has become in an era of the supermom, by refusing to distinguish between the “moms” and by not making much of a gender distinction between Nic (vaguely butch) and Jules (vaguely femme), we are left with too much mothering and a sense that fatherhood is necessary to intervene in the cloying attentions of maternal love. In one stinging exchange, Laser is leaving for the evening and both moms reach out their arms to him asking for hugs. Laser says to Nic – “hug her,” meaning Jules, “that’s what she’s there for!” It is a laugh line for sure but it somehow seals the moms in asexual pathos and interferes with our ability to really identify with them. As Laser leaves, we want to leave with him: as they songs says, “I know I gotta get away, and I know if I don’t, I’ll go out of my mind.”

There are parts of the movie that fuel the disdain that the audience might begin to feel for the moms – we are not given enough info about the basis for their original love and attraction – a quick story about how they met refers to flirtatious attraction between the two but this is a sexual energy that we are told about rather than shown. At the same time, Paul’s effect on women is shown but not told – he does not charm or romance women, with no action on his part, women simply throw themselves at him. This naturalization of his sexual power and the naturalization of the lack of charisma of the moms again stabilizes a grid of desire that always tips in favor of male heterosexuality and leaves lesbians stranded. With the scales tipped this way, it becomes inevitable that Jules will sleep with Paul, that she will become dick-obsessed, that Nic will be cast as the sad, slightly butch partner who loses out to the dynamic, phallic dad. Again, this could have been played differently – Nic could have been a butch; she would have been much more likely in fact to ride the BMW motorbike than Paul (classic beemers are a popular queer choice of motorcycle in fact); she could have been phallic with a dildo instead of flaccid with a vibrator. I am not saying that the lesbian relationship should have been positive and male heterosexuality should have been slammed – but I am saying that Cholodenko is working the well-worn grooves of the cinematic depiction of lesbian desire as a flickering flame always on the verge of extinction and of lesbian-male rivalry as always a mismatch.

continuing reading Jack Halberstam's critique ----->