The Fairies Banquet A visual fugue of eye, tongue, fingers Sandra Lahire on Swollen Stigma Sarah Pucill’s film Swollen Stigma (1998) suggests a sexual tumescence polymorphously displaced onto imagery of unfolding flowers, plucking, deflowering, and coming with red petal juices. A precise edge of pleasure/pain is evoked by the woman tonguing flower orifices and pinpointing nerve endings on her own skin. Swollen macro shots of her eye’s pupil fuse the viewer with the woman who has visions of her phantom, a fragile doll-like woman. The construction of both women caught in each other’s gaze looks out to implicate the viewer. Eye and lashes are fingered in a microscopic language that speaks a state of trance. Eyelash tugging, a seemingly slight action, is camply magnified; the sound of this becomes preternatural. The she-phantom is a kind of pupilla (diminutive of pupa, puppet: from the tiny reflections up-side down at the back of the retina), who hovers between flight and earth. First she appears inverted in a chair, then she is hanging and swinging up-side down.
inversion Tears, drinking glasses, looking glasses and the lens of the eye — play with the film projection beam. One woman encloses another bend in the pupil of her eye. Through this hole, which is the focal point, passes the inverted woman. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, she falls into a hole; either it is very deep or she falls very slowly, “then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards.” The woman in Swollen Stigma is drawn along many intricate corridors of the mind. She relishes inversion, both optical and sexual. Tears swell and optically merge one woman with her phantasm, her remembered passion for another woman. They fuse in a language of light and liquid. This intensity has swollen the skin itself and made the fluids pour out and change colour and seep and soothe old wounds. The world outside is brought closer optically, so that social classifications and commodifications of the body are permeated and undermined by the microsmic eruptions in the film.
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There is a powerful dialectic between a construction and a leap outwards. The diaphanous but confined wing beats signal to take a risk, to move out of paralysis. In this way “social stigma” is transformed to joy in the sexually perverse “swollen stigma”.
plucking from a skin of light The main emphasis of the word “pluck” in the film is “uproot”. This highlights the in-between state of contact/absence in the relationship of the women. The doll-like woman hangs uprooted and haunts the woman who is rooted in her home. To pluck also relates to deflowering, breaking the skin and stripping bare the pores. There is a jouissance of the surface as a screen and as a skin, a layer over a face. The skin which is the film emulsion absorbs the shape shifting rays of light over ceramic surfaces and in the tinctures that permeate and transmute in colour. The woman’s lips and tulips display osmosis between their insides and outsides as if their skins were turned inside out. The private becomes public in a turning inside out, or eruption, in an ongoing scenario. The viewer oscillates between joining her point of view and seeing her in full shot as if her mental furniture has seeped out of her. Our need for a tangible unified subject is dissolved into layers of possible differences or identities. Both the woman and film surface itself “feel” what the body, hand and objects are tracing. Film and skin are fused. Drops of water glide down a luminescent white bowl, as if expressed from a nipple. Blood and milk drops flower out into water, into the film surface. Red galaxies swell in the clear water. A white Milky Way spreads like ectoplasm. The plucking from the skin is pain, separation and uprooting. This sensitivity punctures a numbness. Plants, matches and tears are filmed as if tattooed on her skin. She is so close up she appears to be closing a wound, stroke by stroke, around her eye. By touching her skin she partakes of these memories of her flesh. Away from a linear narrative, the skin enacts an unfolding modest presence.
Living on air
