Underskog

Body Languages
Five films explore limits of desire, bodies doubled, the real and the represented – as well as ass-licking bats and a cat called Kitch. Hand printed, scratched, animated and superimposed; all these films radiate enormous energy and a need to make language anew.

Skellehellavision Martha Colburn (2002 / 16 mm / 8mins/US)
Exploiting inventive techniques of animation to show the world that may await us after death. Using found pornography and scratching skeletons over the footage frame-by-frame we see into a lust-filled Hell. Ass-licking bats, seething snakes, dancing lizards, and frightful females are a few of the stars exploring the over-heated depths of the afterlife.

Self Registration Laura Hindmarsh (2015 / 16mm / 2.5mins/ AUS)
The act of self alignment using hand contact printing. Two ‘selves’ – one clothed, the other naked attempt to catch up and merge into one.

Ciao Bella or Fuck Me Dead Betzy Bromberg (1978 / 13mins/ 16mm/US)
Bromberg shows us a world of crowded New York streets and hauntingly empty interior spaces, graced briefly by wisps of childish energy and the provocation of nearly naked women. She deftly contrasts such vibrant exuberance with a sense of devastating loss, and the effect is at once brazenly personal (if elliptical) and incredibly powerful.

SYNTAGMA Valie EXPORT (1983 / 16 mm / 18mins / AUT)
The body and specifically the “woman’s body” is often used as a focus for questions of origin, subject-object relations, political resistance and sexuality. Valie Export’s notion of “body language” poses an ironic relation to these questions .

Fuses Carolee Schneemann (1964 / 16 mm / 25mins / US)
Schneemann’s self-shot film remains a controversial classic…. The film unifies erotic energies within a domestic environment through cutting, superimposition and layering of abstract impressions scratched into the celluloid itself…
“…I wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to what I felt – the intimacy of the lovemaking… And I wanted to put into that materiality of film the energies of the body, so that the film itself dissolves and recombines and is transparent and dense. There’s no objectification or fetishization of the woman." –Carolee Schneemann