dance of the seven veils

03/01/2017

Inspired by ancient biblical stories and earlier French writers who had further eroticized these tales, the inimitable Oscar Wilde is the first to have credited the character of Salome with the infamous ‘dance of the seven veils’ [1]. Like those salacious French authors from whom his portrayal of the biblical figure was derived, Wilde transformed the character of Salome into a personification of female lust, and her ‘dance’ became symbolic of its seductive and dangerous power. Wilde’s version of this dance is sometimes thought of as the invention of the strip tease.

     In the novel ‘Skinny Legs And All’[2] Tom Robbins weaponizes this version of Salome, playing with her symbolic, religious, cultural and sexual power. In this novel, published in 1990, not long before the creation of both ‘Removed’ (1999) [3] and ‘The Color Of Love’ (1994) [4], the entire convoluted narrative, which is spearheaded by the liberated (both sexually and religiously) protagonist Ellen Cherry, climaxes at the point in which a young girl working as a belly dancer under the moniker ‘Salome’ performs this dance of the seven veils – both a literary invention and a biblical myth. In this dance, performed in a bar owned by joint Islamic and Jewish proprietors whilst they also broadcast the super bowl, she sheds her veils at intervals; each veil falling bares a new secret body part and brings a new moment of philosophical clarity for Ellen Cherry. The first veil she discards is the least expected – the veil that had cloaked her genitals. The last veil she drops is the one that concealed her face.  Her dance was a process of female passion and lust– the ambiguity of her aims, the dual concealment and exposure of her body – the distortion of her figure in the act of belly-dancing – all of these functioning to create a potent and divine depiction and metaphor for the feminine sensuality. The experimental films ‘Removed’ and ‘Colour Of Love’ also exhibit these processes of passion, their functions and movements flowing like a dance, slowly stripping away concealments whilst ultimately shielding the viewer from owning their pleasure in the refusal of true objective understanding. Like the dance of the seven veils, these films manage to take something that was designed to bring a male audience sensual enjoyment and create, from that crude seed, works of female subjective sensuality.

     Within this essay, four processes of passion have been identified. Each one will be considered and substantiated firstly as an overriding philosophical concept, then split as to apply to the separate films. There is variation in these applications as one film may rely more on one process to accentuate female sensuality over another and vice versa. The processes are as follows – revision, elision, distortion and obfuscation. In obfuscation I will not split my discussion between the two films and instead end this paper with a consideration of the qualities that both these work have that could effectively trouble a patriarchal male sensuality and make space for a female one. These processes of passion work together, sometimes simultaneously, to create the complex artefacts of female sensuality that these films have become.

REVISION

     The first ‘process of passion’ to investigate is revision, or the way that the two film-makers, Naomi Uman and Peggy Ahwesh, have utilized their found footage material in these works. How has the original context of the found footage been revised and what has it been translated to? How does the context within these works affect the context of their adjusted pieces? Indeed, what has been changed to create a revision of the context and what has been left, as it originally existed?

     To begin, the very use of material that is incendiary, that is pornographic, must be briefly explained. As Danni Zuvela stated in an article about ‘Removed’ in Continuum  “Avant-garde cinema and pornography share a historical relationship, not just in terms of shared interests at the level of textuality, but also in terms of the spectatorship they have attracted, and, as Williams notes, their screening context:” [5]

     The Williams whom Zuvela is referring to is of course Linda Williams, whose focus on pornography in the sense of the physically affective quality of  ‘body genres’ [6] has a continued relevance, especially when considering how a films literal motions and undulations can be transferred onto members of the audience in the act of watching.

IN REMOVED

     The material found in ‘Removed’ seems almost too perfect in its narrative forms. In terms of shock value, the only thing experienced by an audience member expecting to be scandalized is a profound sense of discomfort, mostly due to the sleazy dubbed dialogue and unyielding performative moaning of the female protagonist. There is very little to see, due to the purposeful elision of every depiction of the female form, nude or otherwise.

     ‘Removed’ is composed of two separate but identically treated pieces of 70’s era European soft-core pornography. The first piece involves a writhing woman on a bed covered in money, attempting to entice a permanently uninterested stud into engaging with her physically by her undulating movements and her stereotypical vocal seductions.  The second scenario revolves around a couple watching another couple from behind a double sided mirror, the protagonist of this parallel storyline also undulating and horizontal, seeming to derive pleasure entirely without another’s touch, but this time in control of the situation, her dutiful lover describing the scene of the young lovers that they are witnessing.

The ways in which the original pieces of found footage are ‘revised’ are as follows – through splicing the two storylines and stag films together, Uman creates an entirely new narrative that speaks of the performative and objectified nature of female sensuality – the strange paradox in the joy of both performing to be watched and reversing the power structure to become the watcher of others.

     The film begins with a blanched version of a woman’s face; a still from before the movie and the only time the contours of any of the women’s face can be visible through the purposeful degradation of her form. This then switches to the simple title screen, removed in typewriter-esque script in a dark green hue. The first strand of the narrative begins, the simple tale of the watched performer and the disinterested viewer. After an interchange of terrible, stilted and strangely staid dialogue, punctuated constantly by the erotic groans of the female character, the audience is forced to leave this storyline in a cut into blackness, stepping up the rungs in ideological complication with the next pornographic excerpt.

     The next part (and separate pornographic piece) shows a couple ensconced in a hidden room that has the enjoyable (and pornographically hackneyed) function of serving as a unsuspected window into the other hotel rooms through the ornately framed double mirror.  They shed their clothes, he, quite conservatively, only loosening his tie and top button, the woman is stripped entirely nude, with the woman assuming a position on some sort of bench whilst the man describes the couple upon whom they are peeping, caressing her half-heartedly whilst simultaneously smoking a cigarette. Their scopophilic session is abruptly halted as the image viewed in the mirror seems to disappear and the audience is subjected to a shot of the empty frame, a moment of confusion that probably led to a moment of erotic complication/confrontation in the original piece.

     In ‘Removed’, however, the screen is blackened once more and a countdown is shown, a nice ironic wink to the tradition of home-movie recreations. To finish, the audience is shown another few seconds of the first narrative, the writhing woman and her bored Adonis. He is finally in bed with her, staring blankly into space, as she curves around him, and then steps up, leaving her and assuming his position stood at the head of the bed. The footage is taken from before the moment the couple is first encountered, not a return or surrender to her wiles but a repetition of his rejection and steely control.

     It is unsure where this material was found but it can be assumed that it was part of a large proliferation of vintage soft-core European pornography and has been carefully and meticulously selected by Uman.                     As previously mentioned, there are a variety of elements of interest that are present in the original footage, which Uman both amplifies and accentuate with her visual effects and cutting choices. One of these elements is the soundtrack and dubbed dialogue. The other is the symbolism of the mirror. The soundtrack, used across both ‘storylines’, is another soft-core pornography trope – an almost spaghetti western style rouser which seems to inspire great dramatic affect in the audience, lending the somewhat mundane and cliché scenes an air of importance and movement – tying the two scenes together in cheesy congruency. The dubbed dialogue works perfectly by adding another level of separation into the piece – the disembodied voices create even more of a chasm between not only the reality of the narrative of the original narrative but between the entire work of ‘Removed’ – not only is the body of the woman scrubbed away, her voice is denied and reconstituted by dubbing – creating a new style of speech – a familiar but disjointed conversation with the audience.

     The mirror scene is noteworthy because the mirror has always been a location of psychoanalytical fascination as well as completely symbolic aesthetically. In Lacanian psychoanalysis [7], the mirror is the structure through which we, as cognitive beings, first realize ourselves as subjective vehicles, separate from the Mother – we see ourselves fully and acknowledge that we exist within the world as ourselves and ourselves only. For women, the mirror often takes on a more layered meaning – the mirror as a prop within classical portraiture signifies vanity or narcissism. For a woman to look in a mirror we are invited to criticize her self-obsession. The mirror can for women no longer be a vehicle of self-discovery, it functions as a camera, reminding her that she is always watched and judged, even by herself – whether she loves the image she sees or she does not. The use of the double mirror in ‘Removed’ to look at another woman, but not look, to hear instead and deny herself even that image, is an interesting choice of footage that is reflected (quite literally) by the choice to actually erase the bodies of the women in the footage. Both the camera eye and the mirror eye are denied.

IN THE COLOUR OF LOVE

     The ‘The Color Of Love’ begins with a cursive title card that imbues the following proceedings with an air of humorous refinement – this is not the first gag that Ahwesh makes to the interception of high and low culture within this work. The context of the work is as follows – a heavily degraded super 8 films shows a piece of vintage amateur erotica. The material shown in ‘The Colour of Love’ fits the very definition of found footage as Ahwesh’s discovery of the pornographic film reel was entirely incidental, perhaps even fateful. She details how she came to create this piece in the following excerpt from an interview with the Millenium Film Journal in 2003, along with her interest in the material and what it meant when used as a piece of experimental film; “I’d never bother to make a pornographic movie. I don’t even try to make movies that shock people. That might be Nick Zedd’s or John Waters’ goal – and a perfectly sensible goal for them. But I’m just into a deep analysis, a looking at things that are meaningful to me, areas that seem worth investigating.” [8]

     Ahwesh also went on to describe the conditions of discovery for the material – which were extremely organic and probably fit the dictionary definition of ‘found art’. Her finding of, and subsequent liberation of, this work takes on an almost fateful, biblical quality in its preordained brilliance:

MacDonald: Where did you find the material you use in ‘The Colour Of Love’?[9]

Ahwesh: A friend of mine dropped off a so-called ‘donation’ at Bard: six big boxes of cans and reels that had been left out in the rain. In all those boxes there was one reel of Super -8mm. I thought I might as well check it out. I looked at it on the Super-8 viewer and realized it was pretty interesting. [10]

     Without yet turning focus onto the sublime colour distortion upon the film, which obviously attracts most of the eyes attention, the context of the pornographic work is also interesting. It appears to be amateur level fetish pornography (in contrast to that shown in ‘Removed’). It is without script, without dialogue and without any sort of narrative pull.  The film displays a trio, two women and a man, with the man in the subservient position. Both soft-core and hard-core acts occur, such as the women appearing to cut the man near his groin and what can only be assumed to be his blood on their bodies, mutual kissing amongst the two women, one woman climbing on top of the man briefly and, most iconically, the exposure of one woman’s genitals by the other.

     The homosexual and violent elements of this pornography are of interest, as is the exposure. The sleaziness and crass nature of the footage, combined with the frightening addition of blood, creates a disconcerting arrangement that may be more troublesome without both the distortion onto the film and Ahwesh’s temporal changes. The homosexual nature of some of the acts shown, and the way that they are made into a thing of haunting beauty as opposed to a sadistic and fetishistic spectacle as was probably the original intention, speaks greatly to a female sensuality that privileges the female psyche and female love.

ELISION

     What is taken away/hidden in these films? What is purposefully scrubbed away from the found-footage material? Also, what meaning does this purposeful and intentional elision produce?

The woman as ‘Lack’ or ‘Nothing’ are two concepts that consistently reoccur when researching an aesthetics of the female, specifically in art or philosophy. This is highlighted in the work of the psychoanalytically inspired theorist and philosopher Luce Irigaray, whose work , especially in the book ‘The Sex Which Is Not One’ plays off of Freud’s conceptions of penis envy [11]. The use of Freud, though somewhat reductive, is important, as a concrete understanding (if there even can be one) of female pleasure has long eluded top psychoanalysts and philosophers, who can only conceive as women in the lack, in what they themselves cannot understand. It has been symptomatically misunderstood or ignored, with the only option being an application of female sensuality onto the already present but thoroughly unsuitable theoretic framework of male sensuality. Irigaray states that “About a woman and her pleasure, this view of the sexual relation has nothing to say. Her lot is that of  ‘lack’ ”.[12] This emphasis on ‘lack’ is also present in the work of Christine Buci-Glucksman [13], who uses the concept of the female ‘nothing’ to explore a new, ‘baroque’ aesthetics – for her a unique and vibrant conception that at once attempts to create a fresh narrative for female sensual subjectivity and harnesses its historicity within previous philosophic and religious discourse. According to Buci-Glucksman in her work ‘An Aesthetics Of Otherness’ – the feminine has been understood as ‘night’ or ‘nothing’ (by way of Nietsche) and that the feminine is shown as a “A space of projection or allegory mingles together the seduction of Helen, the deadly powers of a dangerous otherness, and the proteiform androgyny of Dionysus” [14] In this, Buci-Glucksman begins to develop the transformation, or coinciding, of the feminine ‘nothing’ with the feminine ‘everything’ – which is the nature of her new form of ‘baroque’.

IN REMOVED

     ‘Removed’, of course, contains the most iconic use of elision within both of the films, and serves as the works philosophic ‘punch-line’ – the entire meaning and beauty of the work lies in the very crude deletion of the female body from the film. This titular ‘removal’ was performed by the use of nail polish remover, the acetone meticulously applied to the celluloid to rid the image of every trace of the female body. Amusingly, no detail has been spared as even in scenes that show women hanging as pictures in the background or as reflections on glass coffee tables have received similar destructive treatments.

The fantastic thing about the ‘nothing’ within “Removed’ – the whited out female body is that through its elision, a new form is created. A form that fizzes like electricity, a form that is effervescent. A form that through its lack of concrete discernibility and its almost deity-like effect upon the screen – a form that speaks far more the internal conception of the female body that is present within the female erotic imagination. This is truly the manifestation of the ‘Nothing’ becoming the ‘everthing’ or the baroque conversion of Buci-Glucksmann, who writes that: “Nothing manifests itself only in the most intellectualized or mediated forms: as irony, doubt or negativity in the service of mastery. But on the other hand, Nothing is all. By a kind of heretical-mystical and then baroque conversion, this ‘nothing of being’ changes into an infinity of ecstatic delight [jouissance], a plethora of forms.” [15]

IN COLOUR OF LOVE

     In ‘ The Colour Of Love’, elision is not as obviously present as it is within ‘Removed’. Instead elision can be seen in one vital form – the complete lack of any complete sex act or obvious fulfilment of pleasure.  None of the sex act witnessed within the piece are ever performed to completion, always cutting away to something new – an intentional elision edit. There is also a ‘lack’ of dialogue, of narrative form that conforms to Luce Irigaray’s theory of female ambiguity – whilst there is a lack, there can be no possession or ownership.

     Another ‘lack’ that could be discussed within the film ‘ The Color of Love’ could be the quite obvious focus on a space of Freudian lack – the female genitalia – undisturbed by male bodily influence. Famously a space of male fear – for it is a ‘lack’, there is no phallus – it inspires within a man a state of anxiety via the castration complex. This focus is one that celebrates the ‘lack’ of the female genitalia – displaying it in all its vivid resplendence – refusing to shy away from the reality of the organ. As noted by Irigaray in ‘This Sex Which is Not One’ - “She is `neither one nor two. Rigorously speaking, she cannot be identified either as one person, or as two. She resists all adequate definition. Further, she has no “proper” name. And her sexual organ, which is not one organ is counted as none. The negative, the underside, the reverse of the only visible and morpholigcally designatabe organ […] the penis.” [16] Therefore, the explicitly long focus upon the labia within ‘The Colour Of Love’ does not serve as an object of passion for the male viewer, but one of fear and, conversely for the female viewer it functions as a process of identification with the elision – the female genitalia subsuming the screen in an almost ‘haptic’[17] or texturized, touchable affect.

DISTORTION

     In this paper, I am paralleling the obvious distortions of both of these experimental works with the concept that directly opposes and is developed from the female sensual ‘nothing’ or ‘lack’ – the concept of the female sensuality as ‘everything’. This is because through distortion, there is a delightful pluralism created within the work that belies categorisation, either aesthetically or philosophically. This is a core concept of Irigarian femininity – as highlighted by this statement: “Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural.” [18] This pluralism creates ambiguity, not only a narrative or philosophical ambiguity but an aesthetic one. The films display an explosion of colour, noise and affect that become ‘everything’ in a baroque form. Elision and distortion are two sides of the same coin regarding female sensuality – both the ‘nothing’ and the ‘everything’ working together to produce something that speaks potently of female passion. Irigaray writes:

And if you ask them insistently what they are thinking about, they can only reply: Nothing. Everything.

Thus what they desire is precisely nothing, and at the same time everything. Always something more and something else besides that one – sexual organ, for example – that you give them, attribute to them. Their desire is often interpreted and feared, as a sort of insatiable hunger, a voracity that will swallow you whole. Whereas it really involves a different economy more than anything else, one that upsets the linearity of a project, undermines the goal-object of desire, diffuses the polarization toward a single pleasure , disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse… [19]

This refusal of a singular discourse for female pleasure, this diffusement of desire can be seen in both the aesthetic distortions of the pieces (the dispersal of colour, the musical choice etc.) and the philosophical multivalent aspects of the films.

IN REMOVED

    The distortion performed in ‘Removed’, when not considered under the categorization of ‘elision’, which also becomes distortion in some senses within this work as by the deletion of the legibility of the female form, the body is obviously distorted to become something wildly new and different – a new distorted and thrumming space of sensuality, is mostly due to the editing and cutting of the narrative originally found within the found material. The use of the dual narrative in this sense is amusing, as it could be seen as conforming the idea of the feminine as dual/plural, by way of Irigaray.

IN COLOR OF LOVE

     An interesting factor as to the very notable distortions witnessed within ‘Colour Of Love’ is that many of them were organic to the found footage material.

The beautiful, bountiful colour of the bubbling ripples that occur all over the film, dancing across it like acid burns and kaleidoscopic eruptions were all present when Ahwesh first found the pornographic material. In an interview with Millenium Film Journal she describes this discovery in detail, whilst also explaining what hand she personally had in its distorted quality:

MacDonald: Is the film a readymade?

Ahwesh: Well. No. I did a lot of editing.

I’m not like Phil Solomon. I’m not an optical printing whiz. And I’m not systematic. Basically, I did an improv on the optical printer with the footage. I treat my machines almost like dance partners. I did two sessions on the printer and messed around, eyeballing it, slowing some sections down and speeding others up a bit, repeating some things and elongating the cunt shots. And then I re-cut the material on the flatbed.

MacDonald: And the colour and texture?

Ahwesh: I filtered it a bit, made it a bit more purple, but, basically, the undulations, the emulsion decay and the colour are what was there. [20]

     The idea of ‘dancing’ with the machinery to create the temporal and editing distortions seen within ‘The Color Of Love’ is notable when considering the rhythmic quality of the work.  This, not unlike the careful elision via nail polish remover utilized within ‘Removed’, is an application of a feminine technique – ‘dancing’ – to change/distort a work.

     The distortion found in ‘The Colour Of Love’ also has an ‘incomprehensible’ quality – it creates a mask over the pornographic material that creates a difficulty in vision. The vibrantly evocative green, purple, pink and grey bubbles blister across the screen, similar to the broken and divided quality of classic mosaics, lending the piece that air of antiquity that was so humorously alluded to by the title screen. The figures are so blanched by the visual distortions that they become highly contrasted spectres, hair deep black and bodies bright white, almost comparable to the ghostly female forms seen within ‘Removed’. The music, a classic Tango tune, throws the viewer off in its similarity to an early 20th century silent film – is this supposed to be funny, they ask? Is it supposed to be sexy? Is it supposed to be frightening? This lack of discernibility is also in line with the thinking of Irigaray, who writes: “She” is indefinitely other in herself. This is doubtless why she is said to be whimsical, incomprehensible, agitated, capricious…not to mention her language, in which “she” sets off in all directions, leaving “him” unable to discern the coherence of any meaning.” [21] The ‘language’ of the film – its strange, drawn-out-then-sped-back up temporality, its corrosive colours that frame the screen like the forever twitching curtains of a burlesque show, its shockingly frank and crude material – is pieced together to provide a sensual female incomprehensibility or an obfuscation.

OBFUSCATION

     Despite being pornographic in nature – as the original footage used is pornographic – these films do not appeal directly to male sensuality/sexual satisfaction. There are many reasons as to why this is the case – and these reasons often intercede directly with the processes of passion that I have previously detailed within this work. The first is that via the purposeful elision of the female form, especially in ‘Removed’, the male audience member is being denied the stereotypical ‘male gaze’, as first conceptualised by Laura Mulvey. In fact, both ‘Removed’ and ‘The Color Of Love’ both serve as the perfect solutions or antidotes to the male gaze that Mulvey proposed that ‘avant-garde’ or experimental film could provide within ‘Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema ‘[22], the paper in which the male gaze was defined. This exact denial within ‘Removed’ has been commented on by Ofer Eliaz in their paper ‘Acts Of Erasure: The Limits Of The Image In Naomi Uman’s Early Films’ - “Under erasure, the woman’s body, previously the very surface across which pleasure could slide from (male) actor to (putatively) male spectator, becomes an interruption.” [23]. This ‘interruption’ is also present within ‘The Color Of Love’ due to the disturbing and disrupted quality of the image. Pleasure is thoroughly denied.

     There is a great paradoxical issue within these works in the way in which they both serve to simultaneously trouble male sensuality in their processes of disavowal, which we will call obfuscation, and their processes of passion which appeal to and charge female sensuality within its audience. But perhaps the consideration should be thus – the obfuscation of male pleasure should be considered as another element of female passion – that for female passion to be truly realised the process of obfuscation of male passion must be present as without troubling male passion, a subjective female passion cannot be achieved. Without diverting a male sensuality, there cannot be a female one. As Irigaray claims - “Woman, in this sexual imaginary, is only a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man’s fantasies. That she may find pleasure there in that role, by proxy, is possible, even certain. But such pleasure is above all a masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own, and it leaves her in a familiar state of dependency upon a man.” [24] These films are nothing if not a direct commentary upon this sentiment. Using the pornographic found footage material – they are finding processes of female elision and distortion to destroy even the masochistic pleasure that could be found there for women in the admiration of the bodies or the male control of the acts/image.  This destruction of male pleasure creates a strictly female aesthetic – as Buci-Glucksman noted within an interview in Hybrid magazine: “Beauty furthermore often emerges from the flaws of disaster, rather than from classical harmony alone.” [25]

Out of the ashes of destruction, we shall return once more to the briefly touched upon concept of ‘Haptic Visuality’ – as conceived by Laura U. Marks – these changes or processes are vital for creating a haptic eroticism – an eroticism that is far more in line with a female or feminine sensuality that privileges the ambiguous and non-possessive touch. She asks, quite poignantly, whether pornography can be haptic. Her response is as follows -  “Can pornography be haptic? Pornography is usually defined in terms of visibility – the inscription or confession of the orgasmic body – and an implied mastery by the viewer.” Page 16 video haptics and erotics. [26] As the combined ‘elision’ and ‘distortion’ processes create ambiguity that belies any captive orgasmic moment, at least not visibly (though it could be argued that ‘The Colour Of Love’ is one long, drawn out moment of female ecstasy), therefore mastery cannot take place and the pornographic content is suitable and hapticly transformed.

     Mulvey wrote in her essay ‘Visual Pleasures And Narrative Cinema’ that  “The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical film-makers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment.” [27] This passionate detachment through the processes of passion is precisely what I have attempted to detail within this work. The paradoxical element of these films being both great deniers of the traditional scophilic or ego pleasures that deny that male gaze and the perpetrators of female specific pleasure speaks greatly to the incomprehensibility and plurality of female passion explained in Irigaray’s work. Therefore, these processes of passion that I have underlined and investigated within this work are all functioning together to create something that is not totally definable – but it should not be as female sensuality is, ironically, by definition not definable. These films are multivalent and the feminine is found in their multivalence - their many facets displaying different sides of the feminine sexual psyche that vividly appeal to the female audience member- both in their affective appeals through narrative, revisionist form - the sensual, vibrantly female visual effects that they employ and in their denial of the male pleasure that is in owning and penetrating female sensualities and bodies.

[1] Foreman, J. B. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 569.

[2] Robbins, T. 1991. Skinny Legs and All, London: Bantam.

[3] Uman, N. 1999. Removed, Film.

[4] Ahwesh, P. 1994. The Color Of Love. Film.

[5] Zuvela Danni , 2012. A little light teasing: Some special affects in avantgarde

cinema, Continuum, 26:4, 589-602, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2012.698038 Pg.590

[6] Williams, Linda. 1989. Hard Core. Berkeley: University of California Press.

[7] Webster, Richard. (2002) "The cult of Lacan: Freud, Lacan and the mirror stage.

[8] Ahwesh, P. MacDonald, Scott, Millenium Film Journal, 11.

[10] Ahwesh, P. MacDonald, Millenium Film Journal, 26.

[11] Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Pg.130.

[12] Irigaray P.129

[13] Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. 1994. Baroque Reason. London: Sage Publications.

[14] Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. 1994. Baroque Reason. London: Sage Publications. Pg. 129

[15] Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. 1994. Baroque Reason. London: Sage Publications. Pg. 130

[16] Irigaray. Pg.26.

[17] Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin Of The Film. 1st ed. Durham: Duke University Press.

[18] Irigaray, Pg.28.

[19] Irigaray, 30.

[20] Ahwesh, P. MacDonald, Millenium Film Journal, 11.Pg 26.

[21] Irigaray, 29.

[22] Mulvey, L. 1975. "Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema". Screen 16 (3): 6-18. doi:10.1093/screen/16.3.6.

[23] Eliaz, Acts of Erasure: The Limits of the Image in Naomi Uman’s Early Films, 213.

[24] Irigaray, 25.

[25] Buci-Glucksman, Christine and Quinz. Emanuele [Interview with Buci-Glucksman]: Hyprid 01 2014 For an esthetics of the ephemeral Translated by Sarah Heft. Pg. 6

[26] Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin Of The Film. 1st ed. Durham: Duke University Press. Pg. 16

[27] Mulvey, L. 1975. "Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema". Screen 16 (3): 6-18. doi:10.1093/screen/16.3.6.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahwesh, P. 1994. The Color Of Love. Film

Ahwesh, P. MacDonald, Scott, [Interview]: Millenium Film Journal, Winter, 2003, Proquest.

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. 1994. Baroque Reason. London: Sage Publications.

Buci-Glucksman, Christine and Quinz. Emanuele [Interview with Buci-Glucksman]: Hyprid 01 2014 For an esthetics of the ephemeral Translated by Sarah Heft

Eliaz, Ofer, 2014. Acts of Erasure: The Limits of the Image in Naomi Uman’s Early Films,

Discourse, 36.2, Spring 2014, pp. 207–231. Michigan: Wayne State University Press, Detroit.  

Foreman, J. B. (Ed) 1966 (2nd ed) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. London: Collins.

Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin Of The Film. 1st ed. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mulvey, L. 1975. "Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema". Screen 16 (3): 6-18. doi:10.1093/screen/16.3.6.

Robbins, T. 1991. Skinny Legs and All, London: Bantam.

Uman, N. 1999. Removed, Film.

Webster, Richard. (2002) "The cult of Lacan: Freud, Lacan and the mirror stage.

Williams, L. 2008. Screening Sex London Duke University Press.

Xperimental Eros, DVD, Other Cinema, 2007

Zuvela Danni , 2012. A little light teasing: Some special affects in avantgarde

cinema, Continuum, 26:4, 589-602, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2012.698038