[quote]
The editing back and forth between the child Martina and the adult Jennifer is fascinating. Both are incredible performers, fully aware of the way that Ahwesh's camera interpellates them as such. Martina, preparing to go “on” whilst putting a dress on her plush toy frog, screams over and over, “I'm not ready!” as Ahwesh continues to film. Jennifer, on the other hand, reminds Ahwesh that she wouldn't be there were it not for the camera. These slight gestures of resistance from her subjects (9), however, are displaced by the pleasure they obviously take in exhibiting themselves for the camera.
The scenes with Martina are the centre of the film. In them Martina narrates her interpretations of images torn from magazines and interacts with her mother and Ahwesh, who stays behind the camera but whom we occasionally hear. The scenes of playacting between mother and child are the most challenging. At one point Martina's mother pretends to be a baby and nurse from Martina's breast. The scene is a powerful document of the creativity and freedom that can be explored in the context of parent-child relationships. At the same time, because of the repressive nature of our own culture in regards to the subject of childhood sexuality, the footage makes its viewers somewhat nervous. Although it is not even remotely pornographic, the intimacy of the footage and its long, unstructured nature provoke us into thought. Why, when there is nothing perverse about the footage, does it make us uncomfortable? As well, there is a strangeness that results from the implicit acknowledgement that, although this is incredibly privileged footage in terms of its immediacy, the footage is also highly mediated – as much a performance as Martina's narrating the meanings of the magazine pictures or as, at another point in the film, Jennifer's threatening to use Ahwesh's microphone as a dildo.
The flower footage is the neat, nearly formalist, counterpart to these scenes. Early on we hear a voice reading Bataille's theory of the sexuality of flowers over the image. This text explains that the giving of flowers as a sign of love enacts the displacement at the very heart of sexual desire. Later we hear, again over similar flower footage, Ahwesh coaching Martina through reading aloud Lacan's “The Subject and the Other: Aphanisis.” Martina reads hesitantly but with a persistent cadence. She mistakenly reads “point of lack” as “part of luck”; Ahwesh corrects her. Later, again over similar footage, Ahwesh reads the excerpt again, imitating Martina's metronomic rhythm. While the appropriation and insertion (uncredited) of these bits of theory set up a broad field of resonance with the footage of Martina and Jennifer, there is clearly, as in The Deadman, meant to be no one-to-one correspondence between the texts and the film. Martina's “misreading” clearly undermines whatever authority we might have granted to these texts (especially the Lacan, since that is the text whose reading is both enforced and bungled). Ahwesh's enforcing Martina to rehearse the Lacan also seems to signal the filmmaker's own acknowledgement of the burden she forces her footage to bear, both in its own terms and vis-à-vis Lacanian theory. As well, even our own desire to over-read the film in terms of its quotation of Lacan seems to be made suspect by the film's own deceptive nonchalance. For a film seemingly rather lacking in rigorous form, Martina's Playhouse actually sets up an electrifying network of correspondences.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/ ... hwesh.html
[/quote]
[quote]
"The epicenter of this film is Martina, a raucous girl about three years old. Naked, amid mounds of stuffed animals, Martina acts out variations on a newly acquired femininity-although when she yells at the camera "I'm not ready," it's almost as if she's trying to ward off gender. Like Ahwesh's other films [...] MARTINA'S PLAYHOUSE, with its crashing montage, has a deceptively thrown-together look. It jumps back and forth between crisp, "properly" photographed scenes and faded, unfocused images scarred by glitches and sprocket holes; on occasion the picture drops out completely, replaced by mottled leader." -- Manohla Dargis, Village Voice, 1989
http://www.film-makerscoop.com/catalog/a.html
[/quote]
Martina's.playhouse.(Peggy.Ahwesh,.1989)-fitz.avi 
Allright you ungratefull bastards
I just purchased a vhs from re:voir 'Le film est déjà commencé?' by Maurice Lemaitre and it's full of dialogue and carries no subs, together with the vhs came all of the dialoggues in order of apperance translated to english, will someone synch it? If so please tell me, as I have no intention on doing it, I understand french quite well.
The editing back and forth between the child Martina and the adult Jennifer is fascinating. Both are incredible performers, fully aware of the way that Ahwesh's camera interpellates them as such. Martina, preparing to go “on” whilst putting a dress on her plush toy frog, screams over and over, “I'm not ready!” as Ahwesh continues to film. Jennifer, on the other hand, reminds Ahwesh that she wouldn't be there were it not for the camera. These slight gestures of resistance from her subjects (9), however, are displaced by the pleasure they obviously take in exhibiting themselves for the camera.
The scenes with Martina are the centre of the film. In them Martina narrates her interpretations of images torn from magazines and interacts with her mother and Ahwesh, who stays behind the camera but whom we occasionally hear. The scenes of playacting between mother and child are the most challenging. At one point Martina's mother pretends to be a baby and nurse from Martina's breast. The scene is a powerful document of the creativity and freedom that can be explored in the context of parent-child relationships. At the same time, because of the repressive nature of our own culture in regards to the subject of childhood sexuality, the footage makes its viewers somewhat nervous. Although it is not even remotely pornographic, the intimacy of the footage and its long, unstructured nature provoke us into thought. Why, when there is nothing perverse about the footage, does it make us uncomfortable? As well, there is a strangeness that results from the implicit acknowledgement that, although this is incredibly privileged footage in terms of its immediacy, the footage is also highly mediated – as much a performance as Martina's narrating the meanings of the magazine pictures or as, at another point in the film, Jennifer's threatening to use Ahwesh's microphone as a dildo.
The flower footage is the neat, nearly formalist, counterpart to these scenes. Early on we hear a voice reading Bataille's theory of the sexuality of flowers over the image. This text explains that the giving of flowers as a sign of love enacts the displacement at the very heart of sexual desire. Later we hear, again over similar flower footage, Ahwesh coaching Martina through reading aloud Lacan's “The Subject and the Other: Aphanisis.” Martina reads hesitantly but with a persistent cadence. She mistakenly reads “point of lack” as “part of luck”; Ahwesh corrects her. Later, again over similar footage, Ahwesh reads the excerpt again, imitating Martina's metronomic rhythm. While the appropriation and insertion (uncredited) of these bits of theory set up a broad field of resonance with the footage of Martina and Jennifer, there is clearly, as in The Deadman, meant to be no one-to-one correspondence between the texts and the film. Martina's “misreading” clearly undermines whatever authority we might have granted to these texts (especially the Lacan, since that is the text whose reading is both enforced and bungled). Ahwesh's enforcing Martina to rehearse the Lacan also seems to signal the filmmaker's own acknowledgement of the burden she forces her footage to bear, both in its own terms and vis-à-vis Lacanian theory. As well, even our own desire to over-read the film in terms of its quotation of Lacan seems to be made suspect by the film's own deceptive nonchalance. For a film seemingly rather lacking in rigorous form, Martina's Playhouse actually sets up an electrifying network of correspondences.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/ ... hwesh.html
[/quote]
[quote]
"The epicenter of this film is Martina, a raucous girl about three years old. Naked, amid mounds of stuffed animals, Martina acts out variations on a newly acquired femininity-although when she yells at the camera "I'm not ready," it's almost as if she's trying to ward off gender. Like Ahwesh's other films [...] MARTINA'S PLAYHOUSE, with its crashing montage, has a deceptively thrown-together look. It jumps back and forth between crisp, "properly" photographed scenes and faded, unfocused images scarred by glitches and sprocket holes; on occasion the picture drops out completely, replaced by mottled leader." -- Manohla Dargis, Village Voice, 1989
http://www.film-makerscoop.com/catalog/a.html
[/quote]
Martina's.playhouse.(Peggy.Ahwesh,.1989)-fitz.avi Allright you ungratefull bastards
I just purchased a vhs from re:voir 'Le film est déjà commencé?' by Maurice Lemaitre and it's full of dialogue and carries no subs, together with the vhs came all of the dialoggues in order of apperance translated to english, will someone synch it? If so please tell me, as I have no intention on doing it, I understand french quite well.
