Unlimited But Periodic: A Conversation with Louise Weard on "Castration Movie"
Frank Falisi chats with Louise Weard about the language of the internet, her epic and ongoing "Castration Movie" project, and whether or not we can classify it as a real "movie".
A maxim sometimes encountered in film writing — and one espoused in the transcript that follows — is the notion that a film teaches an audience how to watch it. Surely, the texts and images we encounter in films aren’t solely designed to capitulate to the subsequent texts and images; without room for the incidental, there’s not much room for pleasure or terror. Still, a language emerges as time begins to pass, or is made to emerge. Phenomena from a few frames ago linger along the inside of the eyelid, as even expectations frustrated indicate the inclination toward a grammar, a desire to make meaning, a plan in the play.
The preliminary moments of Castration Movie Anthology i: Traps (2024) teach a spectator a lot. Crucially, they indicate that a certain nimbleness is required. The first text (an epigraph?), credited to the late Norm Macdonald, reads, “Now this may strike some viewers as harsh, but I believe everyone involved in this story should die.” The first sound is a sluggish, distorted beat that collapses upward over a metronomic ticking into Ravine Angel’s “Stay Away”. The song plays over the film’s first image, a Hi8-born one-shot that pans across a row of toilets up toward a woman standing half-dressed in a public bathroom. The first time we see her face, it’s reflected back at us in one of the dingy mirrors. Written in bright crimson: “A FILM BY LOUISE WEARD.”
The woman reflected back at us isn’t Weard. The author and musician Aoife Josie Clements stars as Adeline in the film. She makes music under the moniker Ravine Angel, whose Bandcamp Page notes that the collection “Stay Away” appears in, as commissioned by Weard for Castration Movie, contains “the ugliest and most purposefully alienating songs I’ve ever made.” It’s an apt description: sludgy and plunging, “Stay Away” betrays a lot of pain. The invocation of Macdonald’s quip — long since chirpily excerpted as a reaction image across various social medias — might seem out of step with Ravine Angel’s earnest yowl until you put it back in its broadcast context: the “people” in Macdonald’s story include Brandon Teena, who was raped and murdered in a brutal hate crime. Tragedy, comedy, the dislocation our internet lives breed, and despair at how we connect or fail to all commingle inside the frame, across a woman’s face and body.
