Independent Cinema for Everyone

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s staged films and film installations often start with a song, a picture, a film or a script from the past. They have been working together in Berlin since 2007, producing performances for the camera, staging the actions of individuals and groups living — indeed thriving — in defiance of normality, law and economics.

In this film, performers follow the score To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation, written by composer Pauline Oliveros in 1970 after reading Valerie Solanas’ “SCUM Manifesto”. Oliveros‘ composition asks the performers to choose five pitches each and play very long tones, modulated or unmodulated. In the middle section of the piece the performers are invited to imitate each other‘s pitches and modulations. The cues in this piece are given collectively through light – a red section is followed by a yellow and a blue section, and there are two additional cues given by strobe light.

If any performer becomes dominant, the rest of the group should come up and absorb that dominance back into the texture of the piece. Oliveros wrote that this was a way of “expressing at the deep structure what the SCUM Manifesto meant… It was really out of that understanding of both community and the individual – which was in her manifesto – that became the principle, or the philosophy, of the music that I began to write.“