Just To Say This
Video
6 mins 36
An abandoned doll's house is viewed from an eerie attic, where an ambivalent presence resides: a woman coupled and uncoupled with her double, a doll-like persona, with rope hair.
A film developing the concept of persona in relation to a found object (the doll's house). The doll’s house may be a metaphor for the psychodynamics of a personal relationship to 'home'. The film also references the domestic space used in folk-tale and literature, and the ambivalence of this space for women characters.
It expresses feelings of being out-of-place within a socialised concept of domesticity, as well as romantic betrayal in my own personal life. A sense of fatalism looms, the persona both resists and is controlled by the larger forces that fairy-tale narratives often evoke for the characters within them.
The text and title relate to the William Carlos Williams imagist poem 'This Is Just To Say'.
This film is influenced by Robert Southey's 'The Three Bears', in which the character of ‘Goldie Locks’ is not a child, but rather a 'vagrant' old woman who has been put out by her family, and who invades the woodland home of three 'bachelor' bears.
The ‘doll’ persona emerges from reading Hallie Rubenhold's social history 'The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper', 2019, which depicts the rich characters of these women, the social and personal betrayals they faced, their path to homelessness, and the daily reality of the need to secure temporary accommodation or stays at the workhouse where women would earn their keep by picking Oakham, a kind of rope used in the shipping industry. The sound track includes myself singing a folk-song that reportedly one of these women was overheard singing.
The film also references the tale of 'The Magic Porridge Pot' (where a woman is punished for messing up her domestic duties); Jan Svankmajer's film 'Alice'; Ari Aster’s ‘Hereditary’, 'The Double' a text by Otto Rank, and is influenced by 'Transfiguration' a performance by Olivier De Sagazan.
