(Directed by Jean Mitry) This experimental film poem was photographed and cut to fit the 12-tone musical divertissement written by Arthur Honegger. 2-3-1 refers to the number and location of the drive wheels on the locomotive (a famous train that Honegger had ridden 14 years before). The rhythm of the editing follows that same pattern.
Peggy Ahwesh
The deadman
As is always the case, it is better to attend to the films themselves than to belabour the qualities they share generally. I will start with The Deadman, a film Ahwesh made with her collaborator Keith Sanborn in 1990. It is one of her best-known films and one that immerses us straightaway into many of her preoccupations and methods.
The film grew out of Ahwesh and Sanborn's interest in the work of Georges Bataille and in particular Bataille's text Le Mort which Sanborn translated and on which the film is loosely based. Bataille's investigations of the morbid and the transgressive found sympathy with Ahwesh's Romero-inflected interest in the horror film. Shot in black and white 16 mm, The Deadman actually begins as a sort of horror film: its opening images are of a white frame house, shot from below, the time either dusk or dawn. On the soundtrack someone gasps in (what sounds like) agony. Next we hear the sound of breaking glass and the beating of bird wings, as the image cuts, first to a close up of chandelier, creaking as it sways from the ceiling, next to a shot of a man lying naked on rumpled bed sheets, his penis flaccid in the cradle of his thighs. Scoring the last image is the sound of a buzzing fly – a metonymic soundtrack of death and decay. The next shot is from the outside of the house again, as a woman, naked but for a thin plastic raincoat, leaves the house running. The naked man is the film's ”Dead Man”, the woman, Marie. Ahwesh's camera then follows her as she fucks, pisses, shits and vomits her way through the rest of the film.
The film's events more or less follow those of the story. Ahwesh has said that she was drawn to adapt the text because she liked “how Bataille does not explain the emotions of the characters” (5). The camera actually seems to savour its exteriority to the events of the profilmic. The use of silent film intertitles, all actual lines culled from the original Bataille story, reinforces the exteriority of the film's narration. For instance, as Marie flees the house of the Dead Man (who is named Edward, we learn) and runs into the woods, an intertitle in inserted which reads “When Edward fell back Marie felt a void open.” Then, just after this, a flat female voiceover intones “The time had come to deny the laws to which fear subjects us.” When Marie arrives, some seconds later, (having stopped to piss along the way) in darkness at the doorway of a bar, rain falling and the sound of rain falling, she waits more than two minutes to enter. The camera records this waiting in its entirety in one very long take. The image is poorly lit – so dark we can barely make Marie out only when she moves falteringly into a small sash of light on screen right. In the middle of this long take an intertitle appears which reads “Marie despaired but played with her despair.”
The color of Love
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Jean.Mitry.-.PACIFIC.231.(1949).mpg Peggy.Ahwesh.&.Keith.Sanborn.-.The.Deadman.(1990).mpg Peggy.Ahwesh.-.The.Color.Of.Love.(Vp6).avi 
