Off With Her Head - The Salacious Pamphlets of Marie Antoinette
It happens that these story images are deliberately chosen from the arena of written media during the start of the French Revolution; rather than placing them in conventional order, they have been selected for the path of the irrational absurdity of their content. Originally written as a play, the game of life becomes a reality to an outside entity, the soul, which often shuns the immediate understandings of the prism, with you as the sole witness. The psychotic and the brilliant, the exuberant and the hallucinated, rest underneath the narrative, the artist experiment, and the dreamscape embodied. Here, every word and body performance is capable of transmitting a distinct feeling of catharsis through the story arc and the imminent end. Ultimately one is asked to acknowledge the mirror of the monster within.
A demigod descends to Earth in hopes of experiencing a human life. His placement is within the body of a woman, Marie Antoinette, where he experiences man's inhumanity to man. He is beheaded and ascends back to his original self more whole than before.
This film explores the libel pamphlets distributed throughout Paris, leading to Marie Antoinette's death by guillotine. Taking each propaganda illustration and acting it out reveals the terrific lies the writers experimented with in the creation of her fall, from the ludicrous idea of bestiality and incest in the royal family to the size of her wig and embezzling millions back to Austria. Here we may prove that propaganda can kill you. Further, shot completely in an abandoned railyard, the location lends itself to a vast feeling of neurosis contained. There is within it the insinuation of reality vs insanity, immortality vs mortality, and the fantastic vs the domestic.