Hito Steyerl has a particular reason for blushing. In 1987, she worked in Japan, and posed as a rope bondage model. Her short, Lovely Andrea, documents her search for the photo –or series of photos –twenty years later.
Screening as part of Hot Docs’ Mapping Identities short series, the piece is a fascinating, energetic piece of filmmaking that packs a lot into its 27 minutes. Stock footage, Spiderman cartoons, artful shots of a free-floating bondage performer, and oodles of interviews and photos of those involved with the rope bondage industry in Japan are shown. It’s a heady mix of seamy, sexy, and smart, and it works beautifully in exploring theme of identity it’s a part of.
In speaking with a number of photographers, bondage masters, and archivists, Steyerl ultimately uncovers the unspoken bonds that tie her to her life and her art. Perhaps most fascinatingly, the film uses her search for the photo as a means of examining larger questions of female identity; her journey also reveals the ways in which rope bondage is tied to Eastern ideas about shame, guilt, and limitation.
The short is nicely divided into small sections (humorously indicated with titles like “It’s Art!”, “Independence” and its flip, “Dependence”) and punctuated with loads of pop culture references; everyone from the Pet Shop Boys, to Aretha Franklin, to Donna Summer to the original trailer for the film Spiderman, with a helicopter shown caught in a web laced between the Twin Towers is shown, all linking the themes of connection and binding.
Steyerl also uses her translator, Agehi, as a symbol of self-empowerment; while Donna Summer’s ‘She Works Hard for the Money’ plays to a backdrop of endless shots of sad-eyed Japanese women in photographs, Agehi is presented with simple Japanese music, suspended in rope, fully clothed, and shot upside down, (to make her appear right side up, that is). She floats magically through the frame, both bound and unbound at the same time. It’s a clever dismantling of the masochistic attitudes that seem to creep in around the edges of Lovely Andrea –empowering, fascinating, and strangely poetic.
By contrast, Lilibeth Cuenca’s punchy three-minute Cockfight Song is a low-budget rap against the machismo that dominates both the brutal sport itself and those who enjoy it.
Dressed in a barely-there flesh-tone rooster outfit, Cuenca raps over a simple beat; the irony of a woman donning a stereotypically masculine outfit is not new, but the fact the men involved with cockfighting itself are shown crying for blood underlines an interesting point about male-female relationships.
Structurally, the piece’s format has a definite music-video feel (albeit a very indie one), and its main feature are the quickly-edited clips of cockfights and cheering male audiences interspersed with shots of Cuenca herself.
Both Lovely Andrea and Cockfight Song bring compelling ideas to the notion of Mapping Identity, although, it must be added, the latter’s repeated line of “a cock makes man’s world go around” seems to underline a rather nasty male stereotype.
As one Japanese ropemaster notes in Lovely Andrea, “Genitals are not between the legs but between the ears, inside the brain.”
Lovely Andrea and Cockfight Song screen as part of Next Shorts 3: Mapping Identity.
Both shorts will be screened along with three other shorts on Sunday, April 27th, at 4.45pm, at Innis College.
www.hotdocs.ca
