An 'experimental' film by director Peggy Aswesh. Of most interest to those who like somewhat random experimental films, flowers, and/or OT scenes.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/grea ... rs/ahwesh/
The film switches back and forth between two Super 8 sound home movies: one of the young Martina (Martina Torr) and her mother (the performance artist Diane Torr) in their cramped New York apartment; the other of Jennifer Montgomery (an actress from another Aswesh film) clowning around in Ahwesh’s own apartment. In both cases Ahwesh is behind the camera. These two home movies are punctuated by beautifully fragile, seemingly decayed and scratched close-up footage of flowers and flashes of leader. Over this footage we hear recited texts from Bataille on the sexual meaning of flowers and Lacan on the constitution of desire in the field of the Other.
The scenes with Martina are the centre of the film. In them Martina narrates her interpretations of images torn from magazines and interacts with her mother and Ahwesh, who stays behind the camera but whom we occasionally hear. The scenes of playacting between mother and child are the most challenging. At one point Martina's mother pretends to be a baby and nurse from Martina's breast. The scene is a powerful document of the creativity and freedom that can be explored in the context of parent-child relationships. At the same time, because of the repressive nature of our own culture in regards to the subject of childhood sexuality, the footage makes its viewers somewhat nervous. Although it is not even remotely pornographic, the intimacy of the footage and its long, unstructured nature provoke us into thought. Why, when there is nothing perverse about the footage, does it make us uncomfortable? As well, there is a strangeness that results from the implicit acknowledgement that, although this is incredibly privileged footage in terms of its immediacy, the footage is also highly mediated – as much a performance as Martina's narrating the meanings of the magazine pictures or as, at another point in the film, Jennifer's threatening to use Ahwesh's microphone as a dildo.
[Image][Image][Image][Image]"The epicenter of this film is Martina, a raucous girl about three years old. Naked, amid mounds of stuffed animals, Martina acts out variations on a newly acquired femininity-although when she yells at the camera "I'm not ready," it's almost as if she's trying to ward off gender. Like Ahwesh's other films [...] MARTINA'S PLAYHOUSE, with its crashing montage, has a deceptively thrown-together look. It jumps back and forth between crisp, "properly" photographed scenes and faded, unfocused images scarred by glitches and sprocket holes; on occasion the picture drops out completely, replaced by mottled leader." -- Manohla Dargis, Village Voice, 1989
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Thanks to 'fitz' for the rip!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091490/