Experimental Filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh

Experimental Filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh

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American experimental filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh developed her sensibility in the punk rock 70s and early 80s making super-8 films of friends and bands in Philadelphia.  The transgressive impulses, countercultural energies and do-it-yourself aesthetic strategies of the era have continued to inform her work.  Horror films and low-budget exploitation films, as well as the work of other underground filmmakers, also provide points of departure for Ahwesh. 

Martina’s Playhouse is a work from 1989 that offers a deceptively casual and ultimately complex investigation of feminine identity.  Ahwesh focuses her camera on a young girl named Martina.  At first it seems she wants to document the child’s everyday behavior.  Martina eats and plays. Then, Martina reads French psychoanalytic theory aloud. She exhibits need and then independence.  The playhouse of the title is a reference to the popular television show Pee Wee’s Playhouse. Ahwesh’s version of a playhouse shows the construction of identity at work in the interplay between child and adult, filmmaker and subject.   Diverse and disparate scenes involve Martina and her mother but also the filmmaker and her protÈgÈ, Jennifer Montgomery.  A multi-faceted interaction unfolds between the elements of the film. The filmmaker’s camera functions as an instrument of investigation but also seduction.  Mother and daughter switch roles with the grown-up cast in role of a suckling baby.  Martina becomes the boss, protÈgÈ becomes mentor.  Ahwesh wields the camera as epistemological scalpel, slicing the skin of what we see to reveal how it makes the layers of what we know and who we are.

Skin figures prominently in her 1994 film The Color of Love.  To make it, Ahwesh started with a pornographic super-8 film that came her way. The film was damaged, its image withered by deteriorating, blighted emulsion.  Ahwesh’s film raise the question: what color is love?  In this case, Eros is rose.  Ahwesh manipulated the found film on an optical printer to enhance the carnality of the colors and the duration of particular parts.  By complicating the formal qualities of the skin-flick, Ahwesh comments on the desire to look.  The turbulent surface of the film seems to manifest the desire of the figures on view, but it also seems to be symptomatic of a disease.  But where is this symptom?  Is it in the film?  Or in us?  Or more precisely, between us and the image?  The Color of Love is as much a film about film as it is about sex.  It’s not incidental that the action involves two women who intertwine in the presence of a man who lies quiescent between and beneath them.  Is it possible he’s a dead man?

In She Puppet, a 17 minute long video from 2001, the line between living and dead gets blurred.  It starts with someone, presumably Ahwesh, playing the popular video game, Tomb Raider. The game’s heroine Lara Croft moves through the game world, shooting and being shot at.  Quickly, joystick ineptitude or bad luck causes Croft’s death: game over.  Then she dies again: Ahwesh cuts together a long sequence of her deaths. Being repeatable, death resembles ecstasy, hence something to be desired.  

Ahwesh gleans sequences from the game and combines them to imbue the digital Amazonian Croft with uncanny existence.  Ahwesh moves Croft against the grain of her scripted aims. She fires her gun at no one, making the act purposeless, and as a consequence purely aesthetic.  As she drifts though the canyons and hallways and underwater passages of the illusionary pixel world, she muses on her identity.  Desire, it seems, prompts her to follow an anonymous man.  She tries to step in front of him to catch his attention, but he remains aloof, oblivious to her unless she is his target or attacker.  Croft’s desire to merge with him intensifies; she bumps against him, knitting together their pixels.  The She Puppet is a mechanical creation who has been empowered to slip off the repressive bonds of her control society, and to attain a new consciousness or level of life.  Ahwesh’s film opens our eyes to an image of liberation that points the way to a wholly human ideal.

She Puppet has a number of sisters in Ahwesh’s films.  Characters cut across the rules of the game—or they bump up against them and get shaped by them.  An examination of rules as they pertain to language and technology gives rise to the short films 73 Suspect Words and Heaven’s Gate.   In the first, the 73 words are those flagged by a spell-checking program when Ahwesh applied it to the Unabomber’s manifesto.  The program exerts an annoying and somewhat arbitrary—if soft—control by flagging certain words. Heaven’s Gate examines the titular cult’s website.  The film exhibits in alphabetical order the meta tags, the words that help search engines locate a website, associated with the site.  In these films, Ahwesh points to ways that political boundaries are formed by the insinuation of technology into expression.

Throughout her work, with its dead men and lively women, Ahwesh charts the circuits and interruptions of desire, its exuberant ceaseless flow.  She confronts her viewer with a manifold task: to interrogate who we are, how we became that way and how we can become more alive, more fully human.

For Eight Forty-Eight on Chicago Public Radio, I’m Jonathan Miller.

[Clip from Nocturne]

 I came to know that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference… and that the only true opposite of fantasy is pain. But I am certain that no one can be more human than me, no one can be more human than this.