The screenings in class Monday
9/23, to a certain extent, were foreign to me as a filmgoer. While I have seen
many films that have homosexuals on display, there’s no film that I have seen
that explicitly prioritizes the homosexual point of view. While the selection
of films screened had different levels of explicitness, I found Jan Oxenberg’s A Comedy of Six Unnatural Acts the most provocative
and effective in relaying it’s messages and themes. While Barbara Hammer’s Dyketactics was visually more explicit and
shocking to an eye accustomed to heterosexual imagery, the form and dialectic
Oxenberg employs is, in my opinion more effective and efficient.
While Su Friedrich argues in “Does
Radical Content Deserve Radical Form?” that there hasn’t been an explicitly
radical form that suits the radical themes of lesbian avant-garde and theory
films, I believe Oxenberg’s films are radical. In A Comedy of Six Unnatural Acts the director uses familiar film
structure and aesthetics to relay her story but reveals the lesbian element at
the very end as a surprising twist. It’s not a surprise because the women are
lesbians, but rather, because the viewer has been following along and assuming
a heterosexual encounter will follow. It is the expectation of the viewer, and
Oxenberg’s subversion of the expectation that is radical. She uses the
subconscious mental connection of the audience to illustrate a provocative
message about gender socialization and patriarchal societies built for
male/female couples. In short, Oxenberg self-consciously appropriates “the
system” she is criticizing to make her point, and in my opinion more
successfully than the explicit imagery in Hammer’s film.
- Natalie Qasabian
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