-
Sunday, Mar 12, 2000
Women in the Avant-Garde: Musidora and Germaine Krull
Musidora, the actress we know as Irma Vep in Les Vampires, spoofs her own celebrity and femme fatalism in La Terre des taureaux (Land of the Bulls), which she directed. More a delightful excercise in self-reflexivity than narcissism, the film has the star as filmmaker/adventurer journeying to Andalusia to watch the bulls (from a respectful distance) and the bullfighters, scouting for a star for her movie. Germaine Krull, the intriguing French photographer whose work is currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, made two short films: Six pour dix francs and Il partit pour un long voyage. "Six for ten Francs" is the ad of an itinerant photographer who lands a most difficult gig-photographing a bride and groom in a hilly village fraught with perils, while the wedding guests patiently wait. The film is at once starkly photographic and comic in a René Clair vein. Il partit tells of a young boy's dream of travel, embodied in a barge on which he longs to stow away; he finally gives up everything (that is, homework) to do so. Exercises in visual storytelling, both films are strikingly beautiful as befits this photographer. (JB)
This page may by only partially complete.