Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons (Mulvey/Wollen, 1974): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm
Time Out review:
Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's film opens with a mime performance of Kleist's play
about the Queen of the Amazons, and then proceeds through a suite of
four further sequences designed to tease out some of the main
implications in this opening 'statement'. Feminist issues loom large,
not surprisingly, but the film embraces many other things, from Kleist's
bizarre personal history to the way an actor feels in assuming a role.
It's constructed as an exploration of relationships, real or potential,
rather than as an argument or a single line of thought: it's interested
in the link that may exist between a Greek vase-painting of a warrior
woman and the Suffragettes, or, more formally, between a specific sound
and a specific image. As such, it's a kind of scrapbook with a polemic
kick. And it's also something of a milestone in dragging the moribund
British cinema into an era long inhabited by Godard and Straub.
Tony Rayns
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