by Sophie Mayer

Published in The Berlin Film Journal

““As long as women are denied the priesthood, we will try to make our own rituals at our own kitchen altars and we will sew our own magical capes at our own sewing machines.” – Erica Jong, Witches, 1981”

In the hyper testosterone fuelled Trump age, arguably, one of the most poignant stories to come out of 2018 is from newcomer director, Rungano Nyoni who delivers a narrative fuelled tale, I Am Not A Witch (2017) which bursts and leaps from the screen as it follows the mysticism and misfortune of a nine-year-old girl capriciously accused of being a witch. Witch (n.) Old English “female magician, sorceress” – the primary example of the feared and maligned woman. Witches and witchcraft have been a quagmire of myth, misinformation and Halloween apparatus for centuries. A women’s body is both a place of resistance and exploitation. It is in this fractious space that Nyobni’s image of the woman as the eternally damned witch is conjured. The form of the film allows the spectator to possess the real world, to capture the appearance of a female divinity within a patriarchal culture.

Earlier this month, the 2019 Golden Globes nominations were announced—and, yet again, the directing category is 100% male. Hollywood, the boy’s club behemoth continues to profit off its assembly line of patriarchal tropes. Finding films with originality, energy and ambition is increasingly difficult against money spinning blockbusters and the relentless Disney-fication of our childhoods. According to The Numbers, Walt Disney has the lion’s market share with 26% of all movie distribution in 2018, followed by the Warner Bros with 16,5%. The gulf between independent film and blockbuster bombs continues to widen. The top selling worldwide blockbuster of the year was Avengers: Infinity War (2018), with China the largest contributing territory.

Zambian born, Welsh raised Director Rungano Nyoni offers us a refreshing break from the action fuelled sequel with a candid take on the ongoing appropriation and exploitation of the female goddess through the metaphor of the witch tether. When eight-year-old Shula (Maggie Mulubwa) turns up abandoned and unannounced in a rural Zambian village, the locals are leery and distrustful. A minor incident escalates to a full-blown witch trial, where she is found guilty and sentenced to life on a state-run witch camp. There, she is tethered like an animal to a long white ribbon and told that if she ever tries to run away, she will be transformed into a goat. The ends of the tethers are attached to the witches’ garments — to keep them as prisoners and prevent them from flying away.

The film opens with a strangely Kubrick inspired magical scene that positions the spectator as darkly voyeuristic. Nyoni exploits the possibilities of photographic realism with dramatic illusion by showing us the “witch camp” in modern Zambia. David Gallego provocative cinematography captures the tragedy, absurdity and comic nature of this surrealist story with deadpan humour and thematic coherence. It’s a story bound to leave some audiences baffled and downright uncomfortable in a climate of the #metoo movement. These are the dark comedies that we need to bring sobriety to thousands of years of patriarchy.

I Am Not A Witch explores the vilification of the female witch possessed with evil magic powers, which is as prevalent in Africa as it was in Europe. Witchcraft was a crime in Europe during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. Witches were generally defined as people who had made a pact with Satan in exchange for mystical powers to commit evil acts. It was believed that witches engaged in lurid, sexual acts and killed and maimed children and pregnant women. They were also believed to make men impotent, by stealing their genitals. Most witch hunts continue to revolve around women’s sexuality, male impotence, and infanticide.

In a pivotal early moment in fugitive Roman Polanski’s 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) is raped and impregnated by Satan as a coven of chanting witches looms over her. She, of course waking up with scratches all over her body, prefers to think this is all a feverish dream. It is these horrifying stereotypes, feminist overtones, and inescapable witch like demons embedded in this cult film which coalesce to create a horrifying portrait of marital — and societal — misogyny. Without any effort Rosemary’s body becomes a metaphor for the Patriarchy or Capitalism’s use and abuse of the natural utilities of the female body.

Nyoni’s female gaze delivers a psychological punch by giving us permission to laugh at ourselves, at the absurdity of the patriarchal world we live in, at the tragedy of women trying to regain control of their lives and bodies. The history of withcraft is inextricably tied to the lingering vestige of a primeval religion versus the remarkable goddess, or woman as natural healer. Rungano Nyoni’s strength of montage offers us a chance to identify these stereotypes and mythologies and arrive at a certain phenomenal truth about the inner strength and the power of women in the world today. Women have a history of being unseen, veiled, secreted, buried, vilified and denigrated, whether they are written out of history or included as witches possessed by devils out to destroy mankind.

So where does this leave us today? In 1973 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English published Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women’s Health. Written in “a blaze of anger and indignation,” Ehrenreich and English argued that it was midwives and healers who were most accused of witchcraft, and that witch hunts were part of dismissing and criminalizing women’s knowledge in order to allow state-approved male doctors to take over medical care. “Our ignorance” of our own bodies, they argued, “is enforced.” As historian Carol Karlsen puts it, “the story of witchcraft is primarily the story of women.” Labelling a powerful woman a witch, such as the vitriol aimed at Julia Gilliard, Hannah Gadsby and Hilary Clinton is a the fastest way to conjure up the evil image of a dried up, nasty woman.

According to Dr Charlotte-Rose Millar author of Witchcraft, the Devil and Emotions in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2017) it “seems that we now have two different types of modern witches: those still persecuted for crimes they didn’t commit and those who take on the mantle for self-empowerment.” Nyoni gracefully captures the conflict between the magic of this hybridity and the awful realities of state power, reminiscent of Nietzsche’s view on ‘tragic realism’. Our tragic reality is that men want women to stay in the primary social roles of housewife and child bearer. Pregnant and bare foot in the kitchen, without a voice, a paycheck or a point of view. A movie like I Am Not A Witch is a critical part of a much needed communal misogynistic revisionism, a corrective to our collective amnesia of the beauty and healing power inherent in women. The point is, as Eric Jong says, female power cannot be suppressed; it can only be driven
underground.

by Sophie Mayer

Published in The Berlin Film Journal

““When a girl first starts skate boarding, something magical happens, says Nina Moran, “a skateboard is like their flying broom, when you get on a board, you literally feel like you can fly and go wherever you want.””

It was on the G4 Train in Brooklyn that director and writer Crystal Moselle, WolfPack (2015) overheard Nina Moran talking to her friend about skateboarding. The outcome of this chance encounter is a film called Skate Kitchen (2018) which follows a girl group of teenage skateboarders shredding the skater bro stereotype and flying through the streets of New York.

Instead of trying to exclusively create or record, Moselle’s Skate Kitchen attempts a synthesis of both with a credible form that matches the spectator’s expectations throughout the film. We follow a spectacled, introverted teenage skater, Camille (newcomer Rachelle Vinberg) who sneaks out of suburban Long Island, to meet an all-girl, New York City-based skateboarding crew called Skate Kitchen. One day they advertise a meet-up through social media at a skate park and Camille goes into the city, where she befriends Janay (Dede Lovelace), Indigo (Ajani Russell), Kurt (Nina Moran), Ruby (Kabrina Adams), Eliza (Jules Lorenzo) and Quinn (Brenn Lorenzo). She is accepted by the crew, clashes with her Colombian mother, (Orange Is The New Black‘s Elizabeth Rodriguez) and falls for the alluring sk8er boi, fresh from never-never land, with dyed red hair (Jaden Smith). Moselle focuses the form of the film on challenging gender norms and traditionally male dominated spaces which makes Skate Kitchen emblematic of political progression rather than just another dull girl-meets-boy trope.

Skate Kitchen feels reminiscent of Larry Clark’s 1995 KIDS, yet with a less amoral centre. Funded and produced by Harvey Weinstein, Clark’s film offered the world a disturbing adolescent peep hole with which to consume rape, nihilism and teenage cruelty. Moselle’s camera, in stark opposition, poses a candid, honest view of youth culture. Moselle resists fetishizing skaters with perceived masculine alienation by offering an exploration into the nexus of identity and acceptance from a female perspective. The youth in KIDS have no moral compass, they are misogynists and fixated on bedding virgins. KIDS was a microcosm for the violent disorder that characterised 1995 and the end of the Clinton era. Cut to modern day, and the ‘kids’ in Skate Kitchen punctuate our psyche’s with queer existentialist identity politics rather than the barren wasteland of meaningless sex.

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When we are young, we are constructing our identities and ourselves through our daily interactions and experiences. Moselle gracefully reflects on the human need for others in order to gauge our own existence and create a coherent self-image. As Camille explains, “For a while I was feeling really lonely, “That loneliness you have even in a crowded room, but I don’t have it anymore.” Just like the mysteries surrounding skate boarding itself, the crew in Skate Kitchen grapple with the anonymities of identity, uniqueness and where they belong in a post-internet era.

The ultimate slam scene takes place within the first three minutes of the film, as Camille is credit-carded by her skateboard. In skateboarding, this term is applied when the board lands at ninety degrees between your legs and you land directly on top of it. This act shores up Camille’s physical strength and resolve. These bodily skate risks are traditionally reserved for tough boys, here we are not shown Camille, Carrie (1976) Stephen King style, dripping in blood from her vengeful waist downwards, instead we are shown a girl who moves on, no drama, no prom-night, no period, no hysterics. Camille can endure pain on and off the skate park. There is no mantle of victimhood for Camille and her crew, they emerge as strong young women.

Moselle straddles the line between documentary and narrative film by successfully negating the conflict between reality and illusion through a combination of seamless montage and immersion. Combining hypnotic, dreamy skating sequences of the crew grinding Manhattan with unfiltered, candid speech around menstruation, tampons, gas-lighting and sex. The camera breathlessly swoops, plunges and dives beneath, in and around the action. Split second intercuts of ollies, kick flips, nose grinds and backstabs illuminate the screen whilst this previously unseen girl crew carves up public spaces. This cinematic medley is what VF Perkins describes as “pattern in motion” in his seminal text, Film as Film. It is these impressive patterns of light and play which elevate this into an artistic film.

The camera’s realism takes reference from things that already exist, and evokes a sense of individual skater style, which loosely refers to the character’s actual identity and non-conformist attitudes toward the world at large. These styles take on a variety of forms, expressive, assertive, laid back, graceful or polished and serve to individualise and distinguish the different personalities. “No Bro, I’m a poser” Nina Moran drawls sarcastically when someone spots her board and asks if she can do an ollie. “That’s why I have this shit. I thought this was just an accessory. It’s my purse.” Moran plays the lesbian, Kurt (Nina Moran) who brings a high-spirited character and strength to this new variety of femininity. When one of the skaters admits to being timid about an upcoming gynaecological examination, buoyant Kurt takes a speedy peek and declares her friend’s genitals “valid.”

Moselle lures us in on a heady tonic of rhythm and blues blending beats from Ambar Lucid, Aska Matsumiya, Jaden Smith, Clairo, Khalid, and Princess Nokia all telling is to ‘pop, lock and drop it’ in the search for self. We are invited to witness the new genesis of what it means to behave like a female, move like a female, dress like a female. Moselle rewrites the standard definition of feminine by authorizing these girls with a legitimate visibility. Understanding how the politics of gender influences this construction of identity, is central to the film. Women are no longer at the risk of disappearing into non-existence.

Skate Kitchen re-examines skateboarding culture through a female lens, to expose it’s mixed parentage of grace and irreverence. The film challenges traditional masculine codes of physical prowess, competition and achievement. Skate Kitchen shares its name with the real life female crew that inspired it. Actress Rachelle Vinberg and Nina Moran curated the group after meeting on Youtube. Vinberg came up with the name Skate Kitchen after she read comments under a skate video demanding that she should go to the kitchen and make sandwiches. What was previously a territory reserved for boys, is now attracting a generation of girls who seek the same escape, outlet and play that skateboarding historically reserved for boys. On the streets of New York, both male and female skateboarders are rallying against the systemic sexism that taught women that their place was in the kitchen. The message from Camille foams and fizzles from the screen, ‘Come as you are’ and claim your slice of freedom. This film reminds us that a woman’s place is not in the kitchen, a woman’s place is wherever she is flying.

To All The Witches They Could Not Burn →

Skate Kitchen: The Closest Thing To Flying →