Juliet Bashore’s groundbreaking docu-fiction Kamikaze Hearts is very much a product of a very specific period of the late 80s – not only in content, but also cinematic and cultural legacy. Released just prior to the more marketable and popular New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, Kamikaze Hearts’s taboo subject matter (pornography, graphic sex, and drug use), not to mention unstable genre categorisation and potted release history, scuppered the film’s from achieving canon status. But a 2022 release from Kino Lorber and rounds on various festivals’ restoration circuits courtesy of such organisations as Cinema Rediscovered (also known as CineRedis) have brought the film a new audience – and deserving so, because it’s a film that should be seen by a wider audience.
In Kamikaze Hearts, Sharon ‘Mitch’ Mitchell and Tigr Mennett navigate their relationship as two active participants in the adult entertainment industry while filming a porn parody of Bizet’s opera ‘Carmen’. The production is riddled with set backs and problems, and we see how the filming impacts the couple’s relationship alongside the manipulation, abuse, and the excesses of the underground porn world during the 1980s.
Bashore conceived the idea for the 1986 American quasi-documentary film as a filmmaking student working as an assistant director on a documentary about the porn industry in San Francisco, which is where she met Tigr. Tigr was head over heels in love with Mitchell, and in Bashore’s words, Tigr’s ‘idea of doing this homage to this woman that she was in love with—just came together perfectly. And that’s how it started.’
While multiple elements of Kamikaze Hearts are genuine, the ‘Carmen’ parody and the leading couple’s arguments were scripted and storyboarded, which assists to blur the line between truth and reality. The film straddles a fine line between fact and fiction – its alternative title is ‘Fact or Fiction’ – and this remains a thorough line throughout the film. Plus, Mitchell never appears to be “off” and is constantly performing. At one point she says, ‘I get paid to wait around between shots. I don’t get paid to act. I do that all the time.’
Bashore spoke to ScreenSlate in 2022 about the film’s fluctuating perceptions, and it’s tease between documentary and fiction, saying,
‘I’ve learned to describe it differently depending on who the audience is because, from the very beginning, it was totally misunderstood. And I finally just gave in and said, Okay, it’s a documentary. I mean, people wouldn’t understand that it wasn’t really a documentary. When it first got picked up on the festival circuit it was stuck in the documentary section, and there was nothing I could do. They insisted that it was a documentary. So, I’ve learned to describe it in a way that I think the audience is gonna be able to understand, but that’s transformed. The audience is so different now and, in a way, I’m not used to talking to an audience that totally gets the way in which it is a documentary and isn’t a documentary. That’s not confusing at all to audiences now.’
The initial critical response for Kamikaze Hearts was varied, but Bashore’s filmmaking was consistently lauded, and the film has achieved something of a reappraisal in recent years. Some of the positive reviews included Kevin Thomas for the Los Angeles Times, who praised Bashore for ‘wisely’ allowing individual viewers to decide which portions are true. Liz Galst of Boston’s Gay Community News called Kamikaze Hearts “amazingly powerful,” notably Mitch and Tigr’s relationship and how pornographic performers navigate the lines between fiction and reality and went on to herald Bashore for being “at the forefront of U.S. non-fiction filmmaking”. But even the less favourable reviews could not deny the indelible images and people who linger long after the closing credits role.
As Bashore told ScreenSlate, ‘my film is about the layers of fantasy that surround that. It’s not about the the pornographic image so much as it is [about] all the layers, this other kind of striptease that’s going on, this psychic striptease.’
Aside from being an time capsule of a very specific time and an insightful depiction of the porn industry, part of Kamikaze Heart’s enduring nature – aside from Bashore’s lens – is due to Sharon Mitchell, who is one of the most charismatic screen presences you’ll encounter: glamourous, uninhibited, charming, cosmopolitan, a woman in command of her power who knows how to use her power. Mitchell made approximately 1,000 pornographic films over a 20-year career, including 38 as a director, but in 1996 she quit drugs, became a certified addiction counsellor, and obtained a MA and a PhD from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. Now a credited sexologist, in 1998 Mitchell founded the adult industry’s first mass testing service, which served practically every working performer in the US for 15 years, testing over 1000 performers per month (before being shut down due to data leak in 2011). That’s a film in itself.
*Film introduction for at Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, January 13 2024.
‘The intense desire – and the fulfilment of that desire – experienced through looking.’ – “Scopophilia,” as defined by the artist Nan Goldin.
In a July 2023 interview with the BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine — ‘Entering the forbidden zone: Bette Gordon’s Variety at 40′ by Rachel Pronger — Variety’s director Bette Gordon said, “When you move to New York, one of the first things your family says is, ‘Don’t ever go out alone at night. But of course all I did was go out alone at night!” It was during this time, as a new resident of the city, that Gordon stumbled across the Variety, a dilapidated vaudeville theatre turned porn cinema. She was immediately transfixed, reminiscing: “Its neon marquee [was] right out of the past, right out of a movie. It looked delicious,” she said. “I couldn’t stop looking, the lights. It was like candy, it was just calling me.”
In her landmark text, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ the film theorist Laura Mulvey wrote, ‘It’s the place of the look that defines cinema. The possibility of varying it, exposing it.” Mulvey’s explicitly feminist and groundbreaking thesis provoked enduring discussions about how women are presented and perceived – or looked at – in the arts. Using psychoanalysis and Freudian theory, Mulvey notes that the traditional on-screen gaze positions ‘woman as object, man as bearer of the look.’
As soon as she started making films, Gordon became obsessed with what she described as “the seduction of the image.” In her 2011 article for Artforum titled ‘Look Both Ways’: Amy Taubin on Bette Gordon, the critic and writer Taubin writes, ‘Bette Gordon’s films have always put women first. The sense of adventure in Gordon’s movies springs from her depiction of women’s psyches and bodies, desires and fears.’
Gordon began making short films in the mid-1970s in the Midwestern United States, all experimental works dealing with movement through place, sexuality, culture, and structure. Although her early work was more in line with structuralist filmmaking, she soon became involved with issues combining film and feminism, and rather than pander to the voyeurism of the male gaze, Gordon, as Taubin writes, ‘insisted on training her camera on women, often unclothed.’ She continues, ‘Gordon realised that the problem of the objectification of women in film has less to do with the display of the body than with who has control of the narrative—of the desire that motors it and of how that desire is resolved, or left as an opening into the unknown. She also understood, psychologically and pragmatically, that for a woman to become a filmmaker or to simply enjoy movies, she had to take pleasure in her own voyeurism.’
As Gordon told Sight & Sound. Variety is ‘a story about looking.’ The film centres on Christine, a young Midwestern woman (played by Sandy McLeod), who finds liberation working at a New York City pornographic theatre and becomes increasingly obsessed with a patron who is potentially involved with organised crime.
Based on a (loosely autobiographical) story by Gordon, Variety boasts a screenplay by Kathy Acker, a dynamic writer associated with and influenced by the New York Punk Scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Acker was at the forefront of postmodernism before postmodernism was popular and heavily influenced by experimental writers, including William S. Burroughs and Marguerite Duras, formulating a body of work combining cut-ups of passages and pastiche alongside biography, power, sex and violence.
Variety co-stars the photographer, activist, and the 2023 most influential art figure of the year recipient, Nan Goldin, as Christine’s friend Nan. The Tin Pan Alley bar where Nan works on screen was the Bowery bar where Goldin worked at the time, and which featured alongside the bar’s regulars – friends and sex workers – in her renowned photographic Slide Show The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Goldin also documented the film via various gorgeous on-set images.
Gordon has described Variety as a “part-document, part-narrative, part-desire-filled-landscape of New York at that moment in time”. A Hitchcock fan, Gordon presents Variety as an inverted noir, drawing inspiration from Vertigo (1958) and the idea of what would have transpired if Kim Novak had stalked James Stewart: woman as ‘Investigator’, man as ‘Enigma’. As Gordon reflects, ‘With Variety, I said, let me see if I can have the female as subject. [Christine] transgresses the limits of the situation. She’s the voyeur.’
Variety is a presentation of politics, cinephilia, art, and feminism. The film claims the gaze while disrupting the boundaries of male and female spaces. Early in the movie, while on break, Christine sneaks into the cinema at Variety, as equally fascinated by the men in the theatre as she is by the women – and images – on the cinema’s screen. As Christine’s obsession increases so does her confidence, and she starts boldly entering traditionally thought-of ‘male-dominated spaces’ or once ‘off-limits’ to women: a baseball game, a sex shop, a nocturnal market, all places where ‘man’s business’ is done.
As an independent art film, and to contrast so much Hollywood mainstream fare or even the porn watched by Christine in the film, Gordon refuses to offer narrative catharsis and tie the ending in a neat bow. While contentious to some audience members who seek closure before the end credits roll, Gordon admits, ‘the ending didn’t offer what the audience wanted,’ and is keen to stress curiosity and the grey area — or “empty space” — of desire. Susanna Moore’s book In the Cut also does this very well. Moore’s 1995 book, adapted for the screen by Jane Campion in 2003 (Campion also directed the film), has a divisive ending that differed drastically from the book. Still, fundamentally, it is another crucial New York film about, among various things, women’s desire, sexual power, and risk.
Yet this “empty space,” this ambiguity, is part of Variety’s enduring appeal, prompting discussions, interpretations, and evolving opinions that only occur over time and with the audience’s shifting perceptions. Gordon told Sight & Sound that recent audiences, whether watching the film for the first time or due to their evolving politics over the years, appear increasingly receptive to the film’s provocations. As Gordon said, ‘For me, I want to enter the forbidden zone. Variety forces the spectator, the viewer, to recognise [their] own complicity, [their] own voyeurism… I don’t want to suppress the imagination. And maybe Variety is open to the imagination.’
*Film introduction for at Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, January 6 2024.
*Forgive the cross-posting from my Blogger page, as published there January 1 2024*
Nobody asked, but here it is: my Top 20 Films of 2023, as watched on UK general release and streaming. Sort of ranked. The complete list is also up on my Letterboxd, but here it is for your perusing pleasure (starting with my favourite(s)):
Godland [Vanskabte land] (Hlynur Pálmason, 2022).
Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023).
For those in Birmingham and the West Midlands – as well as those interested – the Midlands Arts Centre has programmed an incredible season of films titled ‘Bad Mums: Motherhood In Cinema.’ Kicking off in late June, I am fortunate to be presenting four of the ten films screening over the summer. Head over to the MAC’s Cinema page for more information—and I hope to see some of you there.
Usually, at this time of year, I post my TCMFF picks, but you may have noticed this year I have not, for the reason I have not attended the festival. I have also neglected this site since December 2023 (!) when I decided to experiment with Blogger instead (you are welcome to join me there, too!), but if demand persists I’ll continue to post here!
Something else that has been terribly neglected is my Substack due to my attention being elsewhere, but I recently wrote a short piece about the Birmingham Surrealist Emmy Bridgwater. What’s that you say, you’ve never heard of her? You’ve never heard of the Birmingham Surrealists? Head over to my page to see for yourself.
Late Night with the Devil, a found footage horror in which a live late-night talk show goes horribly awry, is 1992’s Ghostwatch for the Shudder generation.
As the host of Night Owls with Jack Delroy, Delroy (an excellent David Dastmalchian) is a modestly successful host who “five nights a week helps an anxious nation forget its troubles.” Although happily married and a member of a powerful all-male secret society called The Grove, Delroy still can’t compete with the popularity and accolades of Johnny Carson.
But with wife’s death comes dwindling fortunes and figures, and bids at television sensationalism prove unsuccessful. That is until the night of 31 October 1977, when a disastrous Halloween episode of Night Owls with its spiritually connected guests – including a psychic, a parapsychologist, and a possessed young woman — made Jack Delroy infamous.
With its meticulous 70s aesthetic, horror references, and satirical nature that refuses to verge into parody, the third film from Australian siblings Colin and Cameron Cairnes offers a contemporary twist on the live TV meets found footage formula. Darkly funny yet refusing to verge fully into parody and coming it at 86 minutes, Late Night does enough to keep audiences on their toes. As is said at one point “join us for a live television broadcast as we attempt to communicate with the devil. But first, a word from our sponsors…”
It’s December, I’ve neglected this site, and my newsletter has taken on a Surreal and festive flair for the month. I’ll be back to blogging here in the new year, but to kick things off, I wanted to share something I wrote last Christmas on GDT’s Pinocchio (2022), which originally appeared on my Substack newsletter, Love Letters During a Nightmare, December 2022.
This week, I watched Guillermo del Toro’s beautiful stop-motion Pinocchio (2022). While Disney’s interpretation always terrified and upset me, GDT’s flair for dark fairy tales makes this a dark fable about social oppression and disobedience filled with heart, hope, and a ton of love.
[I wanted to throw up a spoiler warning just case you don’t want any small details ruined if you haven’t seen the film! Maybe you do not mind — we all know the story and images and reviews are online — but not everybody has seen this version with this ending. Hopefully, you have seen the movie and want to read on, or maybe you haven’t and want to read on anyway. Maybe reading this will make you want to watch the film? Whatever camp you fall into, I wanted to give you the option. Ok, let’s carry on!
While I don’t have time to get into the wonderful voice work, or Sebastian J. Cricket, or how much I love Spazzatura the Monkey, I wanted to use this space to discuss GDT’s exploration of death, how he depicts beauty in darkness, and, most significantly, two particular characters: the Wood Sprite and Death.
In Pinocchio, Geppetto fashions the wooden puppet out of the grief of losing his son Carlo in an accidental air strike by Austrian forces. After passing-out drunk, the wooden boy marionette is brought to life by the blue Wood Sprite. Later on, Pinocchio encounters the Wood Sprite’s sister, Death.
I love these characters for so many reasons. Death reminds me of a Leonor Fini artwork, notably one of her sphinxes, while the Wood Sprite (the Blue Fairy in Disney’s version) could be a Leonora Carrington or Remedios Varo deity, such as Varo’s Minotaur (1959). Known for her androgynous, alien figures with oval faces and almond-shaped eyes who more than resembled the artist herself, Varo’s appeasing yet magical protagonists always disarm any preconceived threat or strangeness because of who or what they resemble. In Minotaur, a cosmic blue (like the Blue Fairy) feminine horned creature is non-confrontational, welcoming her visitors or onlookers with a gentle, friendly greeting.
Remedios Varo, Minotaur (1959)
Varo’s Minotaur is both human and not human; thin-legged, delicate, and divine. The hood of a shimmering cloak surrounds her. Small white horns curve upward from each side of her head. Varo has painted a tiny galaxy instead of a crown of hair and holds a gold key in her elegant hands. I kept thinking of her when watching Pinocchio, but my mind kept going to another work by another artist: Toyen, and her forest messenger.
Toyen, Poselstvi Lesa [The Message of the Forest] (1936)
A lesser-discussed artist, Toyen (born Marie Čermínová but used the name Toyen since early adulthood) was a founder and the most celebrated/best-known member of the Czech Surrealist Group. After a period in Paris, Toyen returned to Prague in 1928 and helped establish the city as a significant centre for Surrealist activity. Toyen was good friends with members of the French Surrealist group, including Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dalí, and the French writer, poet, and author of the Surrealist Manifesto André Breton and his third wife, the French writer and artist Elisa Breton.
Toyen was known for dressing in working men’s clothes and exploring gender stereotypes in their life and work. Some speculate they chose their name in a play on the French word ‘Citoyen’ (citizen), which gave a non-gendered identity, as well as being a play on the Czech words ‘To je on’, meaning ‘it is he’. The Czech poet, writer, and fellow co-founder of the Czech Surrealist Group Vítězslav Nezval once said that Toyen “refused… to use the feminine endings” when speaking in the first person.
Poselstvi Lesa [The Message of the Forest] is one of Toyen’s most enduring paintings. Painted in 1936, The National Galleries of Scotland website describes the artwork as follows:
The power of nature over the human world is a recurring theme in Toyen’s work which repeatedly centres on barren, dream-like landscapes, featuring lone girls, fragmentary female figures and birds. The interest in these themes originates in illustrations made for children’s books, but this soon took on a more bizarre and sinister appearance. Toyen was careful not to ‘explain’ the work, but instead left the viewer to explore the symbolic meaning. In common with many Surrealists Toyen had a keen interest in the writings of Sigmund Freud, with works seeming to respond to dreams and nightmares; suggesting a world of intense anxiety.
The Wood Sprite in Pinocchio, Dir: Guillermo del Toro, 2022
Also known as the Fairy with Blue Hair or ‘La Fata dai Capelli Turchini,’ The Blue Fairy or ‘La Fata Turchina,’ the Wood Sprite represents good and divine energy. She is Pinocchio’s guide, his guardian angel constantly attempting to divert him away from risky deeds, yet the rambunctious little boy frequently ignores her well-intended advice. Pinocchio’s rebellion is how he meets the Wood Sprite’s sister, Death.
Death in Pinocchio, Dir Guillermo del Toro, 2022
After Count Volpe convinces Pinocchio to join his circus and Geppetto arrives to take him home, the men have an altercation — a literal tug-o-war for Pinocchio — causing the wooden boy to be thrown in the road and hit by a car. Having arrived in the afterlife, Pinocchio is greeted by the card-playing Black Rabbits and sent forward to Death, the sister of the Wood Sprite. Death tells Pinocchio he is immortal, and while he will return to the mortal realm, cautions that his time in the afterlife will increase each time he returns.
Death is the character who interested me the most. While referred to in the production notes as a Chimera, I cannot help but see Death as a Leonor Fini Sphinx with a Venetian Carnival mask (we will come to the masks in a bit). Death is a Fini painting rendered in claymation for a Netflix audience. The feline guardian of the underworld is the perfect embodiment of everything cat-like for which Fini is so well known.
“I wanted to be like the sphinx”, said Fini, the self-styled ‘Sphinx of Surrealism’. An artist who depicted assured, proud, powerful, and non-subservient women — as well as a legendary cat worshipper — Fini revelled in her sphinx-like association. Leaving a legacy that reversed the preconceived gender associations surrounding the sphinxes, tropes of the Goddess, and the patriarchy of Surrealism, Fini’s sphinxes, much like Death in Pinocchio, are often alone in their lairs or landscapes. Yet here, isolation and solitude aren’t a form of weakness. Instead, they signify both empowerment and nurturing.
Leonor Fini, The Shepherdess of the Sphinxes (The Shepherdess of the Sphinxes (1941)
In her paper ‘La Feminité triomphante: Surrealism, Leonor Fini, and the Sphinx’, the author and scholar Alyce Mahon explores Fini’s association and self-imaging alongside the mythical creature. Mahon notes that ‘for the Surrealists, however, [mythology] offered a fantastic discourse with which to champion the irrational.’ She continues:
The myth of the sphinx was especially attractive, providing the perfect metatext for an exploration of forbidden desire, as well as encompassing the fantasy of the femme fatale, the potential of the city for the marvellous encounter, and a means of self-questioning by which logic and riddle can be set against each other. In the realms of male Surrealists, continues Mahon, “as Breton turned to the Sphinx as a means of reinforcing his knight-muse fantasy, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí turned to the sphinx as the seductive intermediary between gods and humans, fantasy and the real, with an emphatic Freudian emphasis on the tale.
Breton incorporated the sphinx into his writings, most famously in Nadja, his seminal Surrealist novel, which included an encounter between himself and his eponymous doomed heroine in Paris’ Hotel Sphinx. Nadja is Breton’s sphinx: beautiful, forbidden and desired. Nadja is his flawed femme fatale, his fantasy and mystical apparition who he likens to a mythic creature. Yet when Nadja descents into madness, the illusion shatters, and the mystery and majesty vanish. She is no longer his exotic, marvellous creature. Madness in Surrealism is rife with double standards: men were celebrated, Romanised, heralded geniuses, and elevated. Women were destroyed, cast out, and victimised. Forgotten.
Fini challenged these stereotypes.
Leonor Fini, Petit Sphinx Gardien (1943-44)
Fini’s subversive sphinxes bewitch and entice in their autonomous, non-acquiescent, seductive and, often (but not always), predatory nature. She painted the sphinx in various ways, usually as a form of self-portraiture: the sphinx, much like the cat, was her animal and a form of power. By charging herself with this entity, she was aligning herself with all its mythical symbolism. Fini believed this imposing creature was both nurturer and destroyer, a maternal creator of life in possession yet able to wreak havoc and destroy life as much as create. Fini put the feminine back into a traditionally masculine myth and imbued it with many more totemic associations.
Fini and her sphinxes, much like the various women Surrealists themselves, refuse to be categorised. Fini’s sphinxes are not necessarily violent, but they are women who no longer refuse to be quiet. They have the potential to invoke magic. Wild, unleashed, untamed, as the respected Surrealist scholar Whitney Chadwick noted: “Fini’s sphinx […] poses a question not about man, but about the woman artist’s place in the natural and metamorphic process that lies at the heart of the Surrealist vision of an art of fantasy, magic and transformation”.
Fini painted Petit sphinx garden (1943-44) while she was staying on the isle of Giglio, and she continued the theme after returning to Rome. Symbols of necromancy and death surround the sphinx, including a triangle, broken eggs, and an alchemical text. She continues these themes in Little Hermit Sphinx (1948), a volatile and suggestive painting that continues to be one of Fini’s best-known creations.
Leonor Fini, Little Hermit Sphinx (1948)
Chadwick has discussed Fini’s ability of fusion: masculine and feminine, human and bestial, wilderness and civilization, with work that was often darker, symbolically alluding to the forces underneath society and the murky goings-on that linger beneath any glossy surface. In Little Hermit Sphinx (1948), an open doorway reveals a ramshackle, unkempt building with peeling paintwork. An internal organ, which Fini confirmed was a human lung, dangles from the threshold, while leaves, a broken eggshell, and a bird’s skull are strewn on the floor. The sphinx’s black cloak reveals a cat-like paw.
Fini’s biographer Peter Webb said the painting was about Fini’s hysterectomy in late 1947. As Webb writes in his gorgeous biography of the artist, ‘Little Hermit Sphinx is a self-portrait that reflects Leonor’s state of mind after the trauma of her operation.’ The lung, meanwhile, was painted ‘because of the beautiful pink colour.’ It’s a painting of anxiety, trauma, and finding beauty in the darkness.
Although I can see Fini’s sphinxes in Death, I also see another facet of Fini’s life and work. Death’s face in Pinocchio is almost like a Venetian carnival mask — we can say its similar to the masks worn in the ritual scene of Stanley Kubrick’s final opus, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). There is a Fini connection to this, too.
Fini had a flair for the carnivalesque nature of dressing up and the ritual of masquerade. She once recounted,
While still a child, I discovered the importance of masks and costumes. At fourteen, I walked through the streets of Trieste with a girl of my age, with foxtails stolen from our mothers sewn to our skirts. To dress up is to have the feeling of changing dimensions, species, space. You can feel like a giant, plunge into the overgrowth, become an animal, until you feel invulnerable and timeless, taking part in forgotten rituals.
Masks appealed to both the childhood introvert and adult extrovert sides of Fini’s character, and she was famed for her love of masked balls. In a series of photographs by André Ostier, Fini wears several cat-like masks, and in 1949 she made a variety of masks for balls, attending them in the style of birds, cats or cat-birds. Two years later, in Paris, a book was published titled Masques de Leonor Fini (Masks of Leonor Fini), its pages etched with Sphinxes, skeletons, costumed figures, and masked faces.
Leonor Fini as As ’Snowy Owl’ from ‘The Story of O,’ 1949. Photo by André Ostier
Masks allowed Fini to indulge in her love for all things carnivalesque, transformative, and magical while confronting her mortality. As she once said, ‘I have always loved – and lived – my own theatre. To dress up, to cross-dress is an act of creativity…The real excitement for me was the joy at preparing my costume. I used to arrive late, about, midnight, lightheaded with joy at being a royal owl, a large grey lion, the queen of the underworld…’
Towards the end of GDT’s Pinocchio, the boy dies in an explosion. In the afterlife, he asks Death for his life back to save a drowning Geppetto. Pinocchio knows this will make him mortal, but it’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make. After passing in the selfless act, Pinocchio is brought back to life by the Wood Sprite. Following his return to the living, we see Pinocchio at various stages over the years, enjoying a full, rich life and outliving Gepetto and his loved ones (including Spazzutura, whose last scene made me weep more than at any other point in the film), before embarking on his travels for new adventures.
“The one thing that makes life precious, you see, is how brief it is,” says Death at one point in the film. It’s a beautiful, potent quote, rich with poignancy. Fini once said, ‘I wear masks in order to be someone else, and my masks, on my living, moving face, are Immobility. I like that…Death on my face…or perhaps an ideal life. A life without movement. Movement is a sequence of innumerable deaths.’
Chadwick said Fini’s sphinx was ‘both sorceress and the image of death.’ Light and dark, life and death. Two sides of the same coin, much like the Wood Sprite and Death. Both serve as reminders that while there is tumult and turmoil in life, there are small pockets of joy, love, hope, and glimpses of great beauty in the darkness.
Sabina Stent 