Amanda Kramer is another writer/director whose films have shown at festivals around the world. Her latest film, Please Baby Please, starring Harry Melling, Andrea Riseborough and Demi Moore, premieres at the International Film Festival Rotterdam on January 26, 2022. Her previous features include Ladyworld and Paris Window. She is a film radical and stands for the liberation of all artists. Learn more at her website.
God, do we love to dispose of women’s bodies. Nearly naked, tortured and torn apart, sliced open, spilling out. “Disposable” is the right word, isn’t it, in their ripped tank tops and tiny shorts, their desperate lacy lingerie, one sad stiletto missing, maybe a pinky finger gone? From someone, the word “penetrated” is spoken with the solemnity it … deserves? Thank you, Cinema, for reminding us visually that women are murdered en masse and left untouched for their glamorous photo shoots. Pictures later to be scrubbed, through. Relived and relived. Evidence!
I like to imagine there’s a factory that logs these corpses, toe tagging and categorizing. Data entry for our film’s forgotten female dead, in overwhelming numbers. One after the other, day in, day out. On the wall, there’s a time clock. At noon, a lunch break. Robotic gestures, people as machinery, repetition without much time for critical thinking – can’t have critical thinking or the assembly line won’t function properly. Fair enough.
Maybe a half-dead girl slips in the pile? After being stabbed, choked, penetrated, she inexplicably lives. There’s no going home – her death fetishized, her killer caught, her avenger (with his/her own dead child or raped wife or raped dead wife child) at a sort of peace, her avenger’s naysayers proven wrong, her other suspicious friends and neighbors proven innocent(ish), her pimp handed a nasty street justice – there’s only getting to work. At the factory. Logging the lady deceased.
Anyway, that’s a personal thought experiment. These are cardboard sets and cardboard shoulder pads. These are actors I know and clothing from my closet. These are polaroids for Denzel and Angelina’s bone collection. And these are sounds by the incredible Purelle.
