Visions from Pauline Curnier Jardin’s filmic research

On Angitia, clothing and film

This page collects materials on origin stories through two main elements: the festival of the snake-catchers (Festa dei serpari) in Cocullo (Italy) and Ulrike Ottinger’s 1981 film Freak Orlando. The connection between the two elements surfaced through my recent exchange with Pauline and her sketches on processions around Italy already featured in ‘Chapter, 1 Laughter’ on this studio page. I was intrigued by Pauline’s description of the Festa dei Serpari in Abruzzo in which a statue of Saint Domenic is paraded through the streets of the village of Cocullo. Snakes adorn the statues and are carried by local men in the celebrations taking place on the first Thursday of May. Talking on the phone last October, Pauline suggested that the statue of Saint Domenic makes visible how an ancient goddess is now dressed in Catholic clothes.

The procession of Saint Domenic, protector against snakebites, originated in a much older pre-Christian cult. The figure of the saint can be referred back to Angitia, a goddess among the Marsi, an ancient population in central Italy. In antiquity snake-charmers invoked Angitia as their ancestor. The image appearing on the page, with the goddess holding a snake, is the only one that has been identified as representing Angitia. It’s a drawing of an original bronze statue of the goddess, which was found in the area in the late 19th century and later disappeared. The extract from the book Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion, and Politics in Italy recounts how the ritual in Cocullo may convey ‘the women’s perennial resistance to the church appropriation of a gift of the goddess and ascription of it to a male saint’. There seems to be a recurring gesture at work in origin stories, in which older cults are transformed, or dressed, into something else. In the case of the Mediterranean area, pre-Roman and pre-Christian beliefs were repressed or took different shapes often to serve patriarchal and oppressive purposes. It is interesting to note here the coincidence between this recurring act of transformation and the ability of snakes to shed skin and morph. While snakes shed skin when they outgrow it – and this change belongs to their internal biological cycles – the act of ‘throwing a different robe’ onto objects and stories by societies may be described as an external action by which transformation is forced upon the object itself. Part of the research alongside Pauline’s project is to investigate elements such as this connection. Although I’m not able yet to dig into this parallel more for now, there seems to be a tension enacted by the procession by which humans and more-than-human entities recall stages and images of transformation.

Working with film or other art forms might allow to linger on this connection, skin to skin, in a way that cracks it open without fully explaining it. As Pauline starts imagining her long-feature film, I asked myself what kind of materials she might be nourished by. I encountered a scientific study on the local population of snakes in Cocullo, which analyses how centuries of ‘manipulations of the snakes’ during the celebrations might have had an impact on their reproduction cycle. I wonder how the camera would transition among these different potentials layered across the snakes’ skin. The text by Marija Gimbutas, whose findings have been disputed over time, describes the recurring motif of snakes and the figure of the Snake Goddess in Old Europe.

Finally, moving onto film a connection between the gesture of transformation through a different dress and Ottinger’s use of costumes in Freak Orlando seemed suitable, although perhaps slightly far-fetched. Freak Orlando is a retelling of stories through the creation of five world-theatres. In the chapter ‘Hit and Miss’ from Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema, available on the page, the film is described as documenting collective fantasies. Freak Orlando ‘shows that myths were always parasitic hybrids in which ruling conceptions were condensed, without inquiring after their origin or goal’. The film was shot around industrial Berlin, hosting allegorical scenes whose hidden meanings are to be apprehended by lingering on the images. The characters carry out actions outside a stable identity or narrative. Exteriority, surface, even artificiality seem to play a meaningful role. Looking at the images of the costumes and the theatricality of industrial Berlin, I wonder about what sticks to the surface of narratives and objects.

How is artifice intrinsically embedded in the world? How is an entity constructed through its own husk, through costume? How can film be a morphing artifice rather than a representation?

This is an invitation to let the materials on the page sink in. I hope you can linger on them and if you come up with answers to the questions above, please do send them through.

(GD)

Freak Orlando

When Freak Orlando came out in 1981 it received a mixed reception. The subtitle of the film Small World-Theatre in 5 Episodes by Ulrike Ottinger speaks of the slow parade of allegorical images on the screen. The film references both Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando and Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks, and yet Ottinger offers her own versions of such references and stories through her approach to cinema. The images on this page are taken from the first episode: the first version of Orlando, with a beard and dressed in black, refuses to replace a stylite, an ancient ascetic living on the top of a pillar who’s venerated by a group of believers. The believers are dressed in elaborate costumes made of plastic and they take revenge on Orlando. The refined quality of the dresses makes them extensions of the characters’ bodies, an aspect that jars with the cruelty of the unfolding scene.

Describing the theatricality of the film Ottinger stated how she was interested in the relationship between the staged movement in the image, the image frame and the camera movement. Such aesthetic considerations make the film at once challenging to watch but also highly performative. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum talked of the film as the climatic summa of the performance-oriented European avant-garde film. Besides the considerations on movement in the camera frame, the five Orlandos move across centuries. The screenplay of the film framed this movement as the juxtaposition of ‘mythology, department store, and Middle Ages’. In the first scene myths are for sale in a department store. Reflecting on exteriority and decor, this scene seems to capture the illusion at work in myths as well as consumer societies. Everyday gestures such as the continuous purchasing of products, experienced as normal, are revealed to be quite artificial.

(GD)