BRIGHT IDEAS
THE HANDMAIDEN
ISSUE No. 5
HERESY, HEATSTROKE, AND THE INSURGENT FEMINISM OF CELIA ROWLSONHALL’S
of MA
W O R D S
THE LORD 2
B Y V A L E N T I N A I . V A L E N T I N I & J A M E S K A E L A N P H O T O S A N D S T Y L I N G B Y B L E S S I N G Y E N M A K E U P B Y A L E X A H E R N A N D E Z
Standing on the parched slopes of Strawberry Peak, dressed in a long-sleeved, blue leotard, Celia Rowlson-Hall stares at her bare feet. The 31-year-old director of the wordless, surrealist, and eminently entertaining MA— which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last September—is trying to express how it feels to have finished her first feature film. The dirt around her, covered in a pale, fur-like moss that emerged in the Angeles National Forest during California’s four-year drought, is as soft as wool carpet, and coruscates like satin in the dusk light. Around Rowlson-Hall’s shoulders hang three yards of blue fabric, which she pulls tight to her thin frame. Then she begins to run in place. At first, with the board-straight posture of a woman who’s danced since childhood, she jogs at a moderate pace. But after a minute, she speeds up, lifting her knees higher and higher, like a sprinter warming up beside the blocks: her arms pumping madly, her breathing hard
and sharp in the mountain air. And then gradually, as if pressed by a building wind, she slides backward. Sixty feet behind her, the ledge on which she’s dancing drops off at a seventy percent grade toward the remnants of Josephine Creek 1,200 feet below. But as she approaches the threshold, she continues to accelerate. This metaphor for the promotion of her creative work—running in place like a madwoman with her head held high, then losing ground, slipping toward a fatal dropoff—distills into a single, evolving gesture the complexion of Rowlson-Hall’s work: a razor sharp wit conjoined to tragedy via a membrane of grace and beauty. It also illustrates, succinctly, the slog of the contemporary artist-as-entrepreneur, ever creating, and ever promoting. When I met Rowlson-Hall the day before the North American premiere of MA at AFI FEST—where the film would win the Breakthrough Audience Award—she’d been in California a total of two hours. Her plane from New York had landed
late at LAX, giving her just enough time to drop off her bags in Hollywood before we spirited her an hour north to the arid Angeles Crest. But there she was, in the golden light of sunset, responding gamely to a litany of complicated questions using only movement and gesture, as the temperature dropped into the 40s.
A dialogue-free, expressionistic reimagining of Mary’s imperiled journey through the desert to deliver Jesus, MA is the sort of film that—on paper—seems dauntingly self-serious and oppressive. But full of humor, horror, explosive movement, and exquisite, painterly compositions, MA moves swiftly from one emotional and aesthetic revelation to the next. And still, perhaps unsurprisingly, some conservative audiences have found the work too provocative to tolerate. At its World Premiere in Venice, for instance, nearly a third of 3