MAE Makes a Vampire Flick!

Link to view "RETURN" --http://youtu.be/lRv0u3sfsy8

Ok, we didn't set out to make a vampire film. It's just that some images in our latest video effort, RETURN, seem to echo images in the silent classic film "Nosferatu" by F.W. Murnau, 1922.

http://www.google.com/search?q=images+for+nosferatu&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS325&prmd=ivns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=R-IMTunnMKK30AH1u_yrDg&ved=0CCEQsAQ&biw=815&bih=385 [Notice in particular the elongated fingers of the vampire and the gothic, box-like doorways and coffins that often surround his image.]

The art center, which houses the studio where MAE usually films, was designed by the eminent architect Charles W. Moore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Willard_Moore Moore was the winner of the AIA Gold Medal in 1994, an honor he shares with such icons as Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller.

Moore believed that architecture must elicit responses from all the senses, not just the visual. He therefore created buildings and spaces that engaged history, myth and creativity. His work generates environments that stimulate the user. In much the same way, MAE creates films that aim to engage the viewer interactively by stimulating his or her senses of memory and imagination, the psyche, dream fragments, along with all the accompanying emotions.

The art center complex of buildings-- and especially the Studio itself, with its high windows and incredible light-- holds an invisible but palpable magic. Its magic seems to be about the freedom to explore the border spaces between the mundane world, and other dimensions... those of timelessness, imagination, and the creative force which Art reveals when circumstances favorably conjoin.

I have long found the many nooks and niches, cubby holes and crannies of the building's architecture intriguing. What kinds of movement and expression might be possible from within those spaces? And what might film reveal about them?

Even though some of the spaces we wanted to use on the day of filming were not easily accessible from ground level, Yulia took to them like the seasoned rock climber she is. Her improvisational movements within those spaces, although she was greatly cramped, restricted, and confined, are amazingly creative and evocative. Her movements allowed the film's final result-- the scary jerkiness of some scenes in the film, Nosferatu, and the dark, expressionist images of many early, classic horror films.

 MAE's films beg human interaction. They are an invitation for the Viewer to participate with the world conjured by the film. The Viewer can pull that world inside of him or herself and allow it to stimulate-- "call upon" if you will-- what ever is waiting in his/her inner landscapes of memory, dreams, emotions, and response.

If you watch RETURN, we hope you participate. We hope those of your  parts that are cramped will be freed to find grander spaces.

A RED TENT FROM THE FABRIC OF THE GODDESS

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Click here to watch "In the Red Tent" - 

http://youtu.be/Ef6KlfWmjFg
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It all started when Emily gave me her old curtains... scarlet tulle with three inch metallic gold trim. "I thought you might use these for your improv dance group."
Indeed!

MENSTRUAL HOUSES-- A FEMININE HERITAGE

From "In the Red Tent"

So from Emily's old curtains MAE built an environment which turned out to be a red tent. In fact, it became THE red tent of the book, "The Red Tent," by Anita Diament. Diament's fictional red Arabian tent was inspired by traditional menstrual structures-- huts, tents, cabanas, houses, and other dwellings of endless names, from the beginning of human time. Thoroughly feminine spaces, these huts were structures for women to retire to during their monthly cycles.

The male-dominated fields of archeology and anthropology (which never had useful access to the surviving menstrual huts of contemporary indigenous cultures, because they were, after all, well... male.) But these men of science described the women's experiences anyway, surmising that in general the menstrual houses  existed because of "primitive" beliefs that women are unclean during their periods, dangerous, and capable of contaminating material objects, as well as food, and of causing sickness if not fatality. Therefore, they had to be "confined" away from the communities during their menstrual flow.

Later, female scientists, being granted access to the huts and more intimate contact with the women there, described things quite differently. They found that the women themselves characterized their experience of the menstrual hut as a place where women felt free to behave in ways they ordinarily didn't. In the hut, which they designated the holiest structure in the village, the women conducted their own purification ceremonies, and made their own ritual offerings. They were more open about sexuality & reproduction, and talked more candidly about husbands and mothers-in-law. The could be more playful and physically rough, they could smoke cigarettes, sleep late, take naps, drink endless cups of tea, flirt with passersby, and sing and dance simply for the joy of it. It was a place of intermittent escape. It provided women (young & old, post-menstrual as well as menstruating women) with a place from which to act-- to resolve village issues, to be creative and religious; to be part of the larger community of only women from which they were usually divided by family, village and household responsibilities. The menstrual huts were a place of constant flow of people and things coming in and out, as supplies were delivered: food, firewood, bedding, cooking utensils, goddess figurines, women, and ritual items all came in from the outside.

And of course everyone, men and women alike, was born in the menstrual hut-- the red tent-- and thus brought out from the inside. In other words, the spaces symbolized by the Red Tent, were where women experienced an expanded sense of themselves as effective agents and as free people. The structures offered a respite from day to day work, and a space for laughter, affection, long lazy naps, and extra cups of tea. Here, they delivered babies and even slew a few dragons. (Google: Menstrual Houses, "The Kalasha Bashali")

OUR OWN RED TENT:

Betty Backus, from "In the Red Tent"

When Emily's curtains transformed into our own Red Tent, and we began to move within it, how free our movements quickly became, how sensual and ecstatic. How the emotions of tenderness for each other seemed to arise as we gently stroked each others checks, touched hair and shoulders as one would a beloved mother or child, and as we embraced, silently asking for, receiving and giving gentleness, nurturing and comfort.

Gwyn Henry, from "In the Red Tent"

How beautiful I felt as we danced in that red tent, and how beautiful the other three women became in its glow, as if the fabric itself had attracted the energy of a Goddess, which nestled in the brilliant, diaphanous woven threads that surrounded us.

Tanya Notkoff, from "In the Red Tent"

For me, the Studio itself fell away, and a briliant desert surrounded us while the sound of camel bells seemed to hang in the air along with intoxicating incense, and a feeling of ultimate feminine joy and power-- ours to be given to the waiting World.

Yulia White from "In the Red Tent"