Fantasy Dancing: Recent Short Films of Sofía Castro
Argentinian filmmaker Sofía Castro, in two recent shorts, uses different techniques to explore how female performance reflects both the image and reality of women’s lives. Each of them provides the viewer with multiple layers of meaning to absorb and contemplate.
Castro created Rosa Inédita, a six minute short, from an old 16mm reel of Russian American singer Luba Malina doing a “tropical latin” number by Roger Edens called Minnie from Trinidad. Castro scratched and painted directly on the filmstrip, creating a swirling cloud of scribbles, which isolate and highlight Malina’s highly expressive gestures and gyrations. She also occasionally isolates the male admirers who are listening to the number, highlighting the sexual dynamic of seduction and objectification. Cultural appropriation doesn’t get much more inauthentic than this: an American composer and a Russian singer creating a swirl of “hot tropical sexuality” while singing in English for American audiences. The seduction on display here is crass and overt, but also skillful, playful, and humorous.
Castro replaces the film’s soundtrack with the slow, mournful jazz of Spanish band Versonautas, and she also slows down the film’s speed, and this gives the film the feeling of a reverie or memory about great loves and great seductions of the past (which is how we feel about old films anyway). The soundtrack includes a poem, which emphasizes the intertwined nature of love, fear, and death, which is reinforced by the images, when the woman places a gun to her head in the middle of her song. Perhaps she is threatening to kill herself if her lover goes away, a gesture which would surely mingle love with fear and death. Malina’s face works overtime, silently pleading with us for love, surrounded by Castro’s shimmering cloud of painted lines, while the music lends her comic seduction an air of futility and tragedy. It’s a potent juxtaposition.
In Maids, a 5 minute dance film, Castro explores the fantasy life of a woman listening to the radio as she cleans an office. Dancer/choreographer Julieta Ferraro creates the role in a broad comical style, as the maid physically embodies what she’s hearing: music, advertisements, and a soap opera. The theme of this film could be thought of as “the impossibility of escape.” The maid indulges in her wildly exaggerated fantasies in order to escape the boredom of her job, but the fantasies don’t offer much relief: the soap opera turns out to be about a pair of lovers who are plotting to kill their maid. The song which plays at the beginning and end of the film is about being “imprisoned by the clock” while waiting for a lover, and indeed the entire action of the film is shot in a single 360 degree traveling shot around the office, emphasizing the maid’s imprisonment in her work, while her movement emphasizes the dehumanizing, mechanical quality of a clock. The film’s setting, using realistic furniture and props, but lit theatrically and surrounded by a black void, is realistic and imaginary at the same time, just as the maid, who fantasizes while cleaning, inhabits both a real and an imaginary world. In the end, as the camera returns to its original starting point, we haven’t gone anywhere, and neither has she.
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