FILM

“Matthee reworks a sequence from Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) in which a woman dances to the rhythm of jazz and provokes the death of the father. Rather than accepting the punishment to which this woman (and the black culture evoked by the music) will necessarily be condemned by the patriarchal and racist narrative, the filmmaker heightens the subversive dimension of this scene by intensifying the affective power of the sound track and the image in motion (through variations of speed and intensities of light and colour). This reveals the capacity of both the image in transformation and the feminine body to momentarily scramble signifying codes and escape recognizable meaning.” (Maud Jacquin)