Look back: Bimbos & Amazons – Fem Fest Film Night

This programme packed a punch. Hosted as part of the Fem Fest at WORM, it featured a screening of two films, both centred on the destabilisation, deconstruction and reappropriation of feminine archetypes: the Madonna, the Virgin, the Saint, the Amazon, the Bimbo. The pairing of the films was delectable and provocative. 

The first film was ‘Glauben Sie nicht, dass ich eine Amazone bin’ or ‘Don’t Call Me An Amazon’, a cult film dating back to 1985. Through it, Ulrike Rosenbach critically confronts her identity as a woman – and all the baggage and potential that can entail. Shot on two separate cameras, it presents a 12-minute one-shot of ‘Madonna in the Rose Hedge’, the famous 15th-century painting, with Ulrike Rosenbach’s face superimposed onto it. Armed with an Amazonian-esque bow and arrow, the artist repeatedly shoots Madonna (and herself) in the face. As the arrows puncture Madonna, her own face too is pierced. The video performance holds in suspension a haunting feedback loop, inviting us into a semi-lucid state, able to sink out of and into the questions and tensions that surface or are obscured within. How do we get caught in the crossfire of our own (rightful) refusals of the archetypes superimposed upon us? In what ways are we bound to socialisation? How can we use these very bonds and constraints as pivots for subversion and resistance?

Having these questions in mind was the perfect framing for the next film, Head Over Heels, a 2023 bimbo flick by Nelly Danson. It’s a fusion of documentary, colourful cinematography, GTA V footage, animation and unconventional film conventions. It loosely follows the story of a group of girlies squatting Hugh Hefner’s iconic Playboy Mansion, with various side quests and tangents, including the central plot of Nina’s quest for lattes during which she stumbles upon many ruminations, revelations and ruptures. By the end of it, she totally forgets the lattes anyway. The film chronicles Nina as she steps in high heels between planes of seen and unseen, grappling with the fascinating, hilarious and/or horrifying subjectivizations superimposed upon her by various characters and creeps. With its low-budget, off-beat core and out-of-the-box production, the film provides daring glimpses and sinkholes into the multiplicit life of a bimbo. Nonlinear, gorgeously chaotic, often absurd, pink-punk and a whole mouthful of meta. Reality suspended, allowing for deeper matters to be playfully explored. Having Nelly Danson with us afterwards for a panel discussion, to answer some questions and unpack (or keep packaged) some tensions, was an absolute treat, with even more welcome and fruitful tangents. Bimbos assemble. 

It was fascinating to experience the intersecting echoes of these two films in their aftermath. Both utilise the avant-garde technologies of their times to create daring interceptions into the conventions of film itself. Both combine these technologies with troubling subject matters to offer unexpected entry points into these matters. Both entail grappling with identity, in which playful reappropriations and shadowy refusals intertwine. The film night of FEM FEST again stirred up the waters.

text: Elliot Waloscheck
Photography: Joao Pedrozo