Circe, 2020
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Knowing that I would spend a month in Bogliasco, near the port of Genoa on the Mediterranean in Spring 2019 prompted me to re-read The Odyssey. My new film Circe came out of that recent journey into the past, my love for classical antiquity, and out of conversations with actress Jessica Weinstein.
In this film Circe’s tale is woven into a derive, a 3 day passage through the city of Genoa and into the mountains with a puzzling map. Circe takes the walk with three men she befriends in the Aquarium while lurking around large tanks of aquatic animals.
In Homeric times and earlier Circe’s sexuality was connected to the fertility of animals and plants. In The Odyssey she sleeps with and gives good council to Odysseus while she transforms his men into pigs, later releasing them as better-looking men. Stories about the goddess Circe have been circulating for eons. In The Odyssey she is envisioned as a sorceress with shape shifting powers who lives alone on an island with lions and wolves, relationships glimpsed at in archeological finds of a much earlier period. After Homer she was reinvented in Classical Greece and thereafter as a predatory female. In the past few decades she’s been radically re-envisioned by Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and Madeleine Miller.
Circe features actors Jessica Weinstein, Matteo Alfonso, Graziano Siressi and Pablo Tornel. Produced, Written and Directed by Lenore Malen (Cameras: Ruppert Bohle, Lenore Malen)
The entourage reads aloud while they walk, at first from a screenplay by Gary Indiana on dislocation, lost objects, unfamiliar places. Eventually they turn to Book 10 of The Odyssey that they read and re-read, rehearsing for a play while moving through the city.
Circe is a document of a live performance, a comedy and improbable spectacle on the streets of Genoa. The walk is a physical displacement, a move whose makeshift itinerary binds the city voyage to film.
Space, my space . . . is first of all my body. . . it is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand, and all the other bodies on the other. Georges LeFebvre
Film, body, architecture: a haptic dynamics, a phantasmic structure of lived spaced and lived narrative, a narrative space that is intersubjective, for it is a complex of foci-sexual mobilities. Unraveling a sequence of views, the architectural-filmic ensemble writes concrete maps. The scope of the view—the horizon of site-seeing—is the mapping of tangible sites. Elizabeth Grosz
