In our interview last October, Jennifer Reeder told me that her post-SOV/DV work – including the ‘Forevering’ trilogy, a cycle of oneiric coming-of-age tales – have been part of her attempt to “exploit the stickiness of HD.” These late films (Seven Songs About Thunder, 2010 - Crystal Lake, 2016) exclusively occupy the sphere or POV of teenage girls, and Reeder’s deep connection to the tactile elements of female friendship – blood, makeup, glitter, plasters – have made sense of her aesthetic and technological interests, a "stickiness" that reflects the fluids and fashions of adolescence. But her experiments come to a shockingly gooey climax in the opening scene of All Small Bodies, a “post-catastrophe feminist fairytale” that reimagines the basic narrative of Hansel and Gretel.
Once upon a time, many years from now… we emerge at the forest floor, among worms and snails and shards of timber. A thick pool of blood trickles into frame (Fig. 1.1), absorbing its blackened detritus into a syrupy stodge with a consistency closer to jam. This uncanny mixing of elements is a key image in Reeder’s career, suggesting on its surface something sweet and homely, but in the deeper subconscious triggering danger and injury. Slowly, in one of her gorgeous cross dissolves, the trees of this forest are bleached by red (Fig. 1.2), and when they disappear again, the forest floor is completely saturated (Fig. 1.3). Set to the slow moans of a Mamas And Papas cover (‘Dedicated To The One I Love’), it’s a deeply unsettling evocation of the 'outer limits', reminiscent of works by Angela Carter and David Lynch.
Once upon a time, many years from now… we emerge at the forest floor, among worms and snails and shards of timber. A thick pool of blood trickles into frame (Fig. 1.1), absorbing its blackened detritus into a syrupy stodge with a consistency closer to jam. This uncanny mixing of elements is a key image in Reeder’s career, suggesting on its surface something sweet and homely, but in the deeper subconscious triggering danger and injury. Slowly, in one of her gorgeous cross dissolves, the trees of this forest are bleached by red (Fig. 1.2), and when they disappear again, the forest floor is completely saturated (Fig. 1.3). Set to the slow moans of a Mamas And Papas cover (‘Dedicated To The One I Love’), it’s a deeply unsettling evocation of the 'outer limits', reminiscent of works by Angela Carter and David Lynch.
Fig. 1.1
Fig. 1.2
Fig. 1.3
Typically for Reeder, the film’s narrative emphasis lands on the changes occurring within young females. Two girls, ensconced in the deep of the forest, snuggle under a blanket and discuss a feeling that the younger has experienced; “it stopped my heart for a thump,” she says, immediately connecting the elemental forces of the forest to her churning interior networks. Her name is Bub (Katharine Naughton), and the older girl is Z (Sophia Hegarty Scholfield). In one scene they watch a film on a battered analog TV, and it’s Reeder’s 1999 video One Thousand Ways To Skin It, in which two Black Metal Brides lip-sync to 'Smells Like Teen Spirit.' It’s reassuring to know that, even after the apocalypse, at least one item of outsider feminist art has survived. But soon the girls become fascinated by a woman they find wandering the forest, who has managed to gather rabbits and birds for food. Despite the rusting axe attached to her right arm (a wonderfully DIY item, like a prop from children’s theatre), the girls decide to pursue her to a secluded hut...
From here the basic narrative of Hansel and Gretel resumes, but Reeder’s viscous montage of double exposure, cross dissolves, and overlapped diegetic sound conjures a wondrous world of swirling environmental and bodily influences, everything interconnected, electric and sinew. The feeling that Bub experienced seems to be trapped in her growing body, and its current draws her toward a corresponding force embedded in the forest. Her condition is clearly a byproduct of the catastrophe that has forced both girls into isolation, but while Bub's body endures an unnatural change, generated by artificial, man-made forces, Z is awoken one morning by her first period. Amusingly, in a world without parents or science books, she attributes the bleeding to a curse placed on her by the axe woman.
This natural/artificial duality is fully realised in the "stickiness" of Reeder's aesthetic: her constant use of cross dissolves (in which each image actually experiences adhesion and friction with another) and a warm, pulsating synth score that rhymes with the electrical currents in Bub's body. This thematic interest also brings Reeder full circle with the mutated superhero of her SOV White Trash Girl series, about a "toxic inbred disaster" who is the direct result of a patriarchal, technological society run amok - she was born as the product of an incestuous rape and raised in a chemical dump. During our interview, I said to Reeder that White Trash Girl felt like a Saturday morning cartoon directed by Troma, and All Small Bodies unfurls with a similar, albeit more innocent feeling. In its mix of innocence and vulgarity, tradition and experimentation, style and politics, the film occupies an unclassifiable limbo - but it's one that Reeder has made entirely her own.
GALLERY
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