A mentor worth watching: the films of Giovanna Chesler.(Critical essay)

Throughout the twentieth century, artists have tried to question and redraw the boundaries of what society considers both sacred and profane. Many of them have used bodily fluids to do so: Marcel Duchamp literally inseminated his painting Paysage Fautif (1946), Mario Merz put shit in a can, and Andres Serrano infamously immersed Christ in a vial of piss. Yet the bodily discharge that is perhaps most naturally aesthetic, most painterly in its consistency and richly varied in its hue, menstrual blood. remains one of the last artistic taboos. The bold Blood Work (1972) proto-feminist artist Carolee Schneemann or Menstruation Bathroom (1979) by Judy Chicago notwithstanding, "period art" as it is called on various Web sites, tends to elicit a cry of "repulsive!" from the public and a critique of "essentialist!" from the academy. No matter how progressive society believes itself to be, the issue of menstruation is still one that provokes the most knee-jerk of reactions and the most stereotypical of responses, Giovanna Chesler is to be commended, then, for courageously beginning her documentary film, Period: The End of Menstruation? (2006), with elegantly crafted paintings made with this organic, if still suspect, media. As the camera intimately lingers over the crimson curlicues and calligraphic feathers made by artist Vanessa Tiegs, one is reminded that the gaze can be retrained. Beauty is first in the eye of the filmmaker and then in the eye of the beholder. By enticing us to follow her lead through the sweeping and glossy arabesques of blood, Chesler's introduction is a brilliant visual metaphor for the subject and pacing of the film itself, and illustrates her power to make the viewer reconsider what they once believed to be a given.

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During her youth on Long Island in the 1980s, Chesler regularly frequented the art cinema in her small town, and while watching such innovative feminist directors as Jane Campion quickly began to comprehend the power of illuminated images screened in darkened, intimate space, Although she intuitively recognized that the constant cinematic mistreatment of women was an injustice she wanted to see righted, at that point she was not aware that she wanted to make films. It was only later, as a senior finishing her BA in anthropology and women's studies at the University of Virginia, that filmmaking arose as a possible vocation. Chesler was quite literally turning in her final exam in a film history class when the professor asked about her post-graduation plans. He opined that she should be a filmmaker, and Chesler abandoned her original plan to study archaeology at Berkeley. She still moved to San Francisco, but began taking classes at the Film Arts Foundation, and was ultimately accepted into the MFA program in Cinema at San Francisco State University (SFSU). Her rapid development and obvious skill as a filmmaker are evident in her multi-award-winning student films from her years SFSU, namely BeauteouS: The Trilogy (2000-02), and hand-some (2004), which she completed while working as an assistant professor in Communication at the University of California, San Diego.

It is clear that Chesler's early academic studies were a formidable influence upon her filmmaking practice, and continue to be so. As such, it would not be a misnomer to term her a filmic ethnographer. (To underscore her indebtedness to women and her allegiance to matrilineal genealogies, Chesler chose to name her production company G6 Pictures, as she is the sixth Giovanna Marie in her family.) Throughout her body of work, one can sense her sincere need to tell the stories of women who have no other means to voice them and she cites Emily Martin, a feminist anthropologist and author of The Woman in the Body (1987), as her biggest influence. Martin's groundbreaking examination of how powerfully cultural myth and supposition determine what is perceived to be natural about the female body, and thus effect how women then envision themselves, persuaded Chesler to re-imagine how women could be presented in the filmic medium. To imagine literally means to make an image, and as both Martin and Chesler prove. women too often imagine themselves based on pre-existing, negative stereotypes. By doing so, they then inflict further damage upon already vulnerable minds and bodies.

In BeauteouS: The Trilogy, Chesler create three diverse cinematic portraits of three extremely different sisters and their relationships to beauty. The first film, BeauteouS: Stephanie, is narrated by the youngest of the Chesler sisters, who was born with a eleft-lip and palate. Chesler wisely withholds the image of Stephanie throughout the majority of the film. Indeed, the viewer only sees Stephanie's entire face during the last seconds of the film, and as such, must form an image of this young woman based solely on her voice and story. As an example of feminist film practice, this explicit refusal to let the subject be reduced to mere visual object is a politic choice. By disavowing the power of the female face, the ultimate focal point in mainstream filmmaking, Chesler forces us to find an alternative definition for beauty much as her little sister learned to do throughout he childhood. As she speaks, Stephanie is cautiously insightful, and it is clear she was both sensitive to and sadly detached from her painful youth and the torment she received at the hands of taunting peers. In a somber nod to Frederick Wiseman, and to underscore the institutionalization of cultural standards of beauty, Chesler shows us sterile images of padlocked, deserted schools. Chesler's deft use of asynchronous soundtrack with such imagery problematizes her sister's professed absolution of her parents' decision to have her undergo thirty operations so that she might appear "normal." (Such pairings also remind us how often our self-image is imparted through the cruel eyes of others.) Although Stephanie quietly asserts, "My parents" intention was to make me beautiful," she quickly corrects herself: "They knew I was beautiful." Her hesitation makes in clear that despite Stephanie's belief that the best definition "looks at beauty from the inside," society sees it quite differently. All the more poignant, then, is Chesler's last scene, in which Stephanie, still largely hidden from the viewer, painstakingly redefines her lip line. The close-up shots of the tedious actions needed to do so--such as the sharpening of the pencil itself--recall Eleanor Antin's video Representational Painting (1971), which forced viewers to recognize the macabre nature of making up one's "face." When Stephanie finally turns to face the viewer, she is also viewing herself in an ovular mirror and the pose she holds is reminiscent of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665). Stephanie's gaze meets ours via the "looking glass," but is clearly preoccupied with her own visage. Chesler suggests that the definition of a woman's beauty will always be an obsessively self-reflective one, women themselves take control of the frame.

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BeauteouS: Giovanna, Chesler's second film within the trilogy, is a testament to her growing comprehension of the many ways in which a director can influence viewer perception. Shot in black and white, the film takes its stylistic cues from still photographs such as those shot by the Surrealist Man Ray, which isolate, enlarge, and reorient the body--momentarily confusing, the viewer. Her filmic synecdoche--creative angles of dimpled, pimpled buttocks, backs of knees, and curling toes--reconfirms that the view of the body as rendered by the mainstream media is more facile than fascinating. Here, as an abstract counterpoint, Chesler lovingly and loathingly explores her own flesh. The camera's ability to morph its soft curves and hard contours forces us to expand our conventional understanding of beauty. Like menstrual blood, what is believed to be ugly by virtue of its low cultural value can become sublime, re-sensualized so to speak, when viewed anew.

As Susan Sontag wrote in her 1964 essay "Notes on Camp," "One is drawn to camp when one realizes that 'sincerity' is not enough," and Chesler's wise comprehension that the otherwise cliched story of a misunderstood beauty queen would not be effective if treated earnestly, can be evidenced in BeauteouS. This fictional comedy, the last film in the trilogy, is set on Long Island in the 1980s. There, Chesler's second sister was a local beauty queen who longed for her lover to give her something more meaningful than the trite compliment "Cuz you're hot!" Like a true aesthete of camp, Chesler creates a household of women that is an sinister as it is comic, with theatrically hyperbolic miseen-scene and lighting that further heighten the drama. Here, Stephanie is a quite, masked girl in a morphine stupor, while Chesler represents herself as surly punk-rock field hockey, player, a woman who refuses to deny herself her appetite. She and her equally voracious, opinionated mother tear away at turkey legs, while their rabid and rapid dialogue dominates the doe-eyed Donatella. Chesler, however, illustrates just how deceiving such appearances can be. The demure sister is not only seething with passion for a female student in her English class, but writes astonishingly nuanced, if jejune, poetry to profess such desires. When she and her crush finally ride off into the sunset, Donatella's tender pronouncement, "[It was] beauty tasted in the dark," can be reads as a metaphor for the filmmaker's youthful recognition that it was these types of liberating, if once taboo, images that she viewed in the dark that allowed her to re-envision herself and beauty, and it is clear that Chesler wants to continue what her feminist precursors began.

Chesler's willingness to experiment and relinquish control, two aspects of a maturing filmmaker, are both illustrated in hand-some, a reflexive work that ostensibly began with Chesler's jealousy of her sister Michele. As she acknowledge in the introduction, "I had issues with her beauty." At the beginning of the film, Chesler learns that Michele is dissatisfied with her girlfriend, and that their break-up is imminent; the real-life drama ruins the director's expected storyline. What the film ultimately reveals, however, is a more prurient sororal envy. In one scene, the screen goes blank, while subtitles reveal the muffled words "Oh, shit," as well as explain that Chesler has electrocuted herself with the camera. When she electrocutes herself a second time, she sees it as karmic retribution for what she confesses to be her real interest in making the film her own desire to be with a woman and her wish to vicariously experience such a lifestyle through her lesbian sister. But her critical self-awareness is not self-indulgent. Instead, the viewer is compelled to recognize an analogous lack of courage in their own supposed convictions, and to realize how frequently we live through the experiences of other filmically or otherwise.