Director: Robin Noorda
Writer: Robin Noorda
Running time: 9mins
Director: Robin Noorda
Writer: Robin Noorda
Running time: 9mins
Politicising the female form is an ancient process – adapting and evolving with each unequal mode of production and distribution. Each iteration of society sees the precise conditions of the ruling class and the masses shift – but each also plumps for a similar solution when papering over the contradictions inherent in this (those who do most, have least), and propping up the starving and debased workforce this kind of exploitation necessitates.
In the industrial revolution, men who would spend the day toiling in a factory to produce profit would be in need of care, nourishment, physical and emotional support – if they were to continue producing goods at the rate required. And in the absence of a welfare state, these duties were ideologically normalised as being the ‘natural’ domain of women.
Go back a thousand years, you would find variants of this in feudalism. Go back thousands more, and you would find it underlining the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Greece and Rome. Details would vary, specific attitudes would differ, but ultimately the same deal was being made. And at the same time, the men at the head of each society would set these assumptions in stone, by appropriating women’s bodies as ideological signifiers for their world view.
The nation states of Europe and North America in the 18-1900s would often be represented in propaganda as a white, fair-haired, blue-eyed woman – in need of protection at all costs. And the things that the men signing up to war to fight for would, in turn, be the political conditions which ensured the preservation of the inequality that both they, and the women depicted, suffered at the hands of.
Rebirth of Venus is a powerful examination of this historical process. A stop-motion experimental film set in an (initially flooded) ruin, Robin Noorda’s poetry and visuals carry the ideological repression of women through from the white marble pillars of the Roman Empire, to the bleached concrete architecture of 20th century fascism’s attempts to hark back to that society – and beyond.
Based on a poem written by Noorda (as was the case in Lunatic), the narrator covers a long history of subtle and subliminal subjugation: right down to the Pioneer plagues sent to outer space – where the a male figure is shown in a greeting pose, while the female figure remains passive – hypothetically affirming the hierarchy of the genders to extra-terrestrials before they even have chance to meet us. At the same time, the voice gives comparison between the exploitation of women and ‘Mother Earth’ – before perhaps hinting that another world may still be possible.
But the thing which makes this film so interesting, is that its conclusion can be read another way.
Two insect-like cameras – painstakingly animated in their mechanisations – turn their lenses on a block of marble; burning the image of Venus into the rock, before she comes to life and walks into the world. This coincides with clips from a famous Hillary Clinton speech, calling for recognising “women’s rights as human rights, and human rights as women’s rights.”
Then, as the cameras continue their work, they render more iconic forms of women – including the robot from Metropolis. Meanwhile, the narrator – itself an automated text-to-speech programme with a woman’s voice – concludes, “Femininty is what we need. Equality is between us in the Rebirth of Venus.”
But the question which hangs over this montage of sound and image is, does all this strive toward genuine equality? Or is this simply the latest evolution, a necessary update of gender norms, to maintain them as that age-old crutch for other economic and social inequalities?
The inclusion of any speech from Clinton – an infamous foreign policy hawk, and union-buster – to this end could well be taken this way. While her attitudes toward American women of a certain class might be seen as progressive, that is likely to be lost on women living in the places she bombarded by drones, or who she helped to deny maternity leave.
At the same time, the robotic voice of the narrator reminds us of Siri – other brands are available – a digital ‘personality’ reduced to the most reductive and passive of normative traits associated with women. But while she is designed to live up to normative assumptions of what women are like, she is in fact a distillation of the male-dominated tech-bro dystopia which the likes of Apple, Google,Amazon and Palantir are bent on building.
Leaving us to sit, uncomfortably, in this moment, is a brilliantly eerie move on the part of Noorda and his team. Because we cannot be sure if we are enjoying a moment of liberation, or in fact, being manipulated to cheer for a moment of generational compromise, where the ancient syntax of exploitative societies overlaps and aligns with our own once more.
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