It Is at This Point That the Need to Write History Arises (È a questo punto che nasce il bisogno di fare storia), 2024
Director: Constanze Rhum
Constanze Rhum, an Austrian woman who lives mainly between Vienna-Berlin-Paris, is an artist in broadest sense of the word. Although she studied visual arts, as want or need arose, she took roles of a researcher, curator, director of films and video works, creator of installations, and author of essays. Her productions explore the relationship of different time-based formats between film and new media, their history and theory, and focus on questions of identity, representation and performativity. Engaged in topics of female identity, she acts from a feminist perspective, and devotes herself to the gender dimension. Therefore, it is not surprising that she found inspiration for this film with unusual and complicated, but very adequate (although difficult to translate!) title, both in the Italian feminist Carla Lonzi, co-founder of the Rivolta Femminile (Women’s Revolt) movement from the 70’s, and in the French proto-feminist group Les Précieuses (Precious Ones) from the 17th century, the subject of an unfinished study that Carla Lonzi worked on in the last years of her life. This study, published posthumously as an edited collection of sketches, reflections and notes in the book “Armanda, sono io!” (“Armanda, it’s me!”), is the starting point of the film, which takes both the director and the audience through atypical time and historical serpentines. It begins in a prison from the 17th century, where letters, film strips (which in reality do not exist until 19th century) and broken mirrors have been hidden for hundreds of years. Mirror pieces are a recurring leitmotif. Sometimes the mirrors break, sometimes they assemble from fragments, and most often they reflect a bright light. In fact, throughout the film, the director searches for her reflections in mirrors from the past – be it the characters of real women or Moliere’s heroines (who were also real, perhaps). She recognises current personal problems as permanent, structural and timeless. Female.
It’s not a requisite to follow the film, but knowledge of German and Italian language is beneficial for easier focusing on visual component rather than translation. You will need good focus, curiosity, openness, willingness to expand knowledge by subsequent reading of available literature and an honest attitude towards gender issues. You don’t have to be a feminist, and a penchant for philanthropy can be helpful.
Among the topics on women’s identity, its manifestations and difficulties in manifestation, cases of violence against women are particularly prominent. Rape trials from the 17th century are presented through the imaginative creation of the radio news of the time (the radio was a twentieth-century invention). Repeating similar radio reports that speak in detail about terrible events strengthens the impression of the number of humiliating events that double-victimise women – in addition to the horror of the act of rape, the court interrogations of investigators and defence lawyers are just as horrible.
The director also finds violence in family photo albums and claims that it can be recognised in movements, poses and looks. The hands are most interesting to her and she pays special attention to them, so as an important ingredient of the film she offers a mini-study of the movements of women’s hands.
Another important theme omnipresent in the film is art and its importance for women – acting, photography, writing, filmmaking – with a special emphasis on recording movement, behaviour and gaze (with the interesting observation that the gaze should be used more often as a weapon), and the importance of the lens through which can be viewed in various ways (“Every raindrop that falls is a lens”).
If this film is to be categorised, the most apt description would be an experimental essay with documentary aspirations. It is experimental both in the visual domain (because it was made as a collage of imagined, acted and documentary moments, both black and white and brightly coloured), and in the narrative domain, because starting from the present, it goes into the past and speculates in a thoughtful, philosophical way about possible paths to the future of that time. If this sounds stratified and complicated, you’re right. Writing history is by no means linear or conventional, so why should one simply write that history which needs to be invented at a given moment?
Marinela Domančić