Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Paris, 1896
The inventor of the cinema is also a magician.
Compared to his colleagues, however,
George Mélies has one more weapon.
Cutting the film here and there
he can create wonders that would be impossible in a theater.
The story he tells in this film
has a huge impact on the collective imagination.
It involves a man who,
in order to give evidence of his powers,
uses as a tool the body of a woman.
Here we see an assistant covered with a cloth.
When he takes it away, she's gone.
Then she reappears,
but has become a skeleton.
The scene will be reworked ten, hundreds, thousands times.
This is the story of the strange power
that is carried out with the submission of a woman.
New York 1900.
Edwin Porter reconstructs the scene using a swing.
This time there are two men.
One gets rid of a woman.
The other makes her skeleton reappear.
The "cut&paste" allows far more gruesome performances.
Again, at woman's expense.
Alfred Clark depicts the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots.
At the right time the actress is replaced by a puppet,
but the result is very realistic.
Some are convinced that a woman has been sacrificed for the film.
Over time, the stories are enriched with details.
In this drama of love and death for men only, Mélies creates
a doll one piece at a time.
Then he starts to kiss her and asks her something.
She says yes, but he is moving her head.
The puppet comes to life and he can use it for his own pleasure.
Man undresses the woman, and it is easy to guess what this unbridled ballet
refers to.
Then he covers her, and
after a few moments, he assaults her like a robber would do.
He seals her in a lot, then he breaks her literally to pieces.
The story must have something irresistible.
It seems impossible to question its dynamics and characters.
Even Alice Guy Blache,
the first female director,
dares to reverse the genders.
In this film of her, is still a man to get rid of the assistant, not before
she has been transformed into an ape.
These are the years of the Grand Guignol,
the theater staging violence and torture more and more daring.
Born in Paris, it reaches its climax in London in the Twenties.
It is here that in 1921 Percy Selbit presents for the first time
one of the most shocking performance of all time.
The magician immobilizes a woman, tying her with ropes.
She is sealed in a coffin, which is then sawn in two parts.
When the box is reopened, the woman comes out unscathed.
The "woman cut in half"
consolidates, even in the name, the sexist stereotype
and inspires hundreds of trucide variants.
But to avoid any confusion of the roles,
on the catalogs for magicians, the victim is always clearly
a woman.
"The Disappearing Lady"
"Shooting Through A Woman"
"The Hindu Sacrifice... of a young lady"
"Death-Defying Casket... with a young lady inside"
Of course, we are at the beginning of the 20th century. The stereotype pictures a
patriarchal society, where women's suffrage has just been granted.
In those years the supporters of the vote to women are treated as
dangerous terrorist.
As a provocation, Selbit offers 20 pounds to their leader Sylvia Pankhurst
to cut her in half.
The woman refuses indignantly, but the newspapers do not lose the opportunity
to be ironic:
For Selbit and his audience, sawing a woman in half is a political message.
Rage over her means hold off a figure that would claim
the same rights as a man.
What has changed in a century later?
Almost nothing.
Forty years ago, Mrs. Pankhurst hoped that 1973 would be
the year of the liberation of women in magic.
Today, women continue to be pierced, impaled, buried with rats and crushed
amidst applause.
As if no time had elapsed.
Today, however,
an innocent look on torture like these is no longer possible.
"Never mention rope in the house of a man who has been hanged"
says an old proverb.
Today's news brings me home the story of Hané, stabbed to death
by her husband.
The story of Ilaria, *** and murdered at age 19.
The story of Antonia, murdered by former companion with a punch in the heart.
And when I change the channel,
I can not watch these scenes without thinking.
Without feeling embarrassed about virility expressed in these forms.
What it reveals the showing of power,
through the symbolic destruction of a woman?
Which remote insecurities does it bring to light?
Which kind of relationship do these tableau reveal?
What does it tell us any of the many magicians in which
one can encounter?
There is a middle-aged man who is accompanied by a young woman. The backdrop
is that of a domestic scene.
It seems a cruel reference to the place where more often the violences are consumed.
The two did not exchange a word,
but she knows well what soon will happen.
She accepts it by sitting down and
adjusting the dress embarrassed.
She has the public eye on her, as he closes her head
in a box.
Hard not to sympathize with her, hooded like a condemned woman
to the gallows.
Then he pulls out a knife
and sticks it in her head nonchalantly.
There is no before and no after.
It is the representation of a pointless and senseless femicide.
Without additional references
we wonder if the scene embodies the infamous dictum
"When you come home, beat your wife. You do not know why, but she does."
But here the violence is carried to excess.
Not one, but two, three, many stab wounds.
The scene is even more alienating for the lack of resistance.
This is the reaction of a woman faced with the threat of a man.
Everything here shouts the absolute, gray daily routine.
Shortly after, a new torture device appears.
The unfortunate girl lends herself to it
with equal docility.
This time we see her eyes forced to the ground,
but with no clue as to the guilt that is serving.
A sword pierces her neck, then the arms.
The girl escapes unscathed,
but are we sure that the blade
does not leave wounds?
I am reminded of Lorella Zanardo and her documentary "Women's body":
"Can a woman crawl under a perspex table,
pretend she is the legs of the table,
spend a long time under it, pretending that it's only a silly game?
Can this be done without it leaving a scar somewhere in
her body?
And what should people who are watching the programme feel about it? On TV there is a woman
and a man is using her as the legs of a table."
Even Lucy Fischer contests that this is a game. In an article on
the role of women in magic she asks:
At the end of the performance, the young lady knows that the applause are all
for the man. She is just a prop.
A body to desecrate for the enjoyment of those who applaud.
The instrument confirming the power of a man.
Scenes like this are repeated every day, on stages around the world.
The dynamic has entered so deeply in the imagination as not to raise
any objections.
Not a single spectator who stands up to shout
how becere and out-of-time the dynamics represented are.
What traps us inside stories so violent and vulgar?
The point is not to prohibit the staging of femicide.
Perhaps, however, we need words telling finer stories.
Edgar Allan Poe
wrote that the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic
in the world.
The raven of his most famous poem haunts its protagonist.
We suspect that the man killed his woman
and the animal
embodies the voice of conscience.
There is a woman, there is a ***,
but there is also an inner voice,
an anguish that does not give peace to the executioner.
There is a story that teaches us to complexity.
It is not precluded even the opportunity to play with these themes,
but finding the right balance is difficult.
Loredana Lipperini writes that "playing with symbols and stereotypes, requires
a thorough knowledge of the rules of the game."
Examples are few.
In "Follow the Boys"
Orson Welles and Marlene Dietrich
depict a representation rich of refined and
ironic tones.
The woman agrees to be sawn in half,
keeping a sly, unnatural look.
The man asks two sailors to do for him all the efforts.
We see him in the background,
mimicking a compulsive magician.
he can not stop doing magic,
into a childish looking for confirmation of his powers.
When the cut is complete, the woman laughs:
the blade has just tickled.
The legs go away on their own, and the performance ends.
In the next scene, the situation is reversed
and now the Dietrich wins.
Welles tries to hypnotize her, but he ends up in catalepsy.
Then there are those who chose the shock to denounce the cruelty
behind these shows.
The magicians from Las Vegas Penn&Teller
brought in magic
what Quentin Tarantino has brought the cinema:
a violence so excessive as to become a parody of itself.
When the two enact the death of someone, this is irreversible,
as the true death.
In a recent exhibition they saw a woman in half, not even dreaming
to reconnect her.
As in ***,
the scene is hyperreal, and the show so truculent as to be lived
like a punch in the stomach.
As noted by Francesca Coppa,
Penn&Teller compel viewers to come to terms with the senseless cruelty
of the performance,
but even more so with the cruelty that characterizes the public itself.
"Do you realize what you clap?" they seem to ask them
with their performances.
Today a naive look is no longer allowed.
We must meditate deeply about the stories we tell
and try to tell different stories.
Iaia Caputo writes:
"We are, after all, narrative animals.
Unaware of our stories,
forgetful of stories,
we condemn ourselves to witness the unfolding of a terrified violence,
that - if not educated or sublimated - has the face
of ordinary, everyday barbarism of our time."
It's time for us men to resist such barbarity,
and tear away from our flesh the call of violence
and the taste of oppression.
It would be the only power to be proud of.