by Red Cell
A hybrid between Jean Cocteau and Jan Svankmajer, La Femme Qui Se Pourde (aka “The Woman Who Powders Herself”), with its Gothic expressionism and artful grotesqueries crossed with the metric precision of Kurt Kren‘s more clinical materialaktion films. These films experimented with the plasticity of surfaces, most notably in the deformed figures of Kren’s short film, 10/65: Selbstverstümmelung featuring Vienna Actionist artist Günter Brus. This is Patrick Bokanowski‘s earliest film, an evocation of concealment and unmasking, where the mundane act of a Victorian era woman’s ritualistic application of cosmetic powder seemingly opens the window, or perhaps Pandora’s Box, into underlying human anxieties of physical beauty, youth, desirability, and objectification, reflecting the superficiality of societal notions of beauty through the alien-ness of landscape and the ephemeral riddle of true identity through epic, soul-searching journeys and faceless phantoms that emerge from thin air before vanishing from view. – Unknown + Editor
La Femme Qui Se Pourde / “The Woman Who Powders Herself”
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http://theendofbeing.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/La_Femme_Qui_Se_Poudre_1972.flv
Selbstbemalung/Selbstverstümmelung
Directed by Patrick Bokanowski.
Credited cast: Jean-Jacques Choul, Jacques Delbosc d’Auzon, Claus-Dieter Reents, Nadine Roussial.
Original Music by Michèle Bokanowski.
Film Editing by Patrick Bokanowski & Renée Richard.
Other crew: Christian Daninos …. collaborator.