X Characters / RE(hers)AL

Character Outline

X Characters: RE(hers)AL releases seven female characters from seven different movies - each an icon from the history of modernist cinema - and joins them together as a gang of fellow travelers stuck in the boarding area of an airport. Detoured and out of their historical routines, the seven characters begin to get their bearings in a situation - a crossroads disguised as a holding pattern. Routes intersect, and new patterns emerge as these sleepwalkers, androids, phantasms, prostitutes, and murder victims start to establish relations and new forms of behavior to connect the gaps in their scripts along the lines of a speculative orientation towards an unknown future.

The compass points are drawn as the relations begin. New scripts orient the old scripts from one another and in every direction, to map out a cosmos of shifting identities which is structured by the characters' voices. These voices emerge and shape in contradistinction to their original roles and along the contemporary notion of joining scripts between film, theater, and chat, and then back again, to a hybrid form of media identity.

Characters as Signifiers

Laura, Alma, Giuliana, Hari, Rachael, Bree, Nana

X Characters: RE(hers)AL is an ongoing project which seeks to develop new characters for future productions. It attempts to envision a contemporary discourse through considering correspondences between eras of feminist film theory and practice, and contemporary constructions of female representation populating the screen. It anchors back to differing notions of "women's voices" in modernist cinema, and from there develops a performative, character-driven site between cinema, theater, and new media. Its characters are selected from different film scripts, ranging from 1960s auteur to modernist cinema to the borderline of the postmodern 1980s. The original characters can be said to be scripted as both lead and supporting actors. They slip in and out of their roles: as the director demands that they embody the notion of "woman as symptom" and at the same time requires them to maintain what is expected from a leading role.

They suggest a social and cultural transformation occurring within the modernist paradigm represented in cinematic discourse, where the potential of female characters usually remained safely interred within the conventional modernist canon. As the respective authors' agencies of narrative, they are transported to their main fixations, flowing outwards and displaying a fundamental condition of anxiety and distress within a modernist universe defined by internal discord, psychological conflicts, and the breakdown of communication. The seven characters were chosen as signifiers to enable the shaping of new dialogues and voices, re-scripted along the lines of new media. What is omitted from the original movie scripts - that which is left unsaid - becomes the starting point for X Characters: RE(hers)AL to begin routing through new narratives.

The seven characters (Alma, Bree, Giuliana, Hari, Laura, Nana and Rachael) are "released" from their original film scripts. Each character was transformed through a number of "movements": first through performance-oriented chat room meetings followed by script development and then the final realization process as theatrical performance recorded on video.

Chat Room

Over the course of a year, invited participants met on a regular basis in a chat room where each embodied one character in the framework of an improvisational performance chat group. Discussions and dialogues were developed around moderated subjects and situations. The participants were meant to reconfigure and adapt the characters' original profiles, thus operating in the gap between their own identities and the characters' desires. The accent was placed on improvisation and live interaction as well as on the characteristics of the specific situation provided by the chat room. Instead of one single author, there were seven characters / voices at work, each following their own logic, thus structuring a layered dialogue. The documents of these live "workshop" interactions developed a series of possible situations and materials by which new sets of dialogues and scripts could be established. The results obtained within this first performative movement were used as basic outline for a script, which was edited and transformed. This script charts the movement of both the character's passage and the rites of the story, and was finally realized as a staged performance with seven Berlin-based actresses to be recorded on video.

The project's focus on "identity-interaction" and on new discussion formats in inter-communicative and interactive environments is an important feature of its foundation in media. X Characters: RE(hers)AL constitutes a work between research and practice, suggesting that the selected character icons of cinema modernity function as "re-links" to a cinema informed by a critical feminist practice. This ranges from the discourse on authors and "authorless" worlds to an essential discussion of feminist research into cinema and representation, indexed to a re-reading of gendered dialogues and continuing into emerging cyber-fields. This foundation sets the project within the fields of cinema, the language of new media, and issues of identity construction. The script and production of X Characters: RE(hers)AL is a process that converts the character templates into projection screens, channels of desire that constitute a switchboard for networking sets of communicative signals and shifting identities.

Character Plot

The seven characters are stranded in the boarding area of an airport, where they have to wait as all departures are delayed due to weather conditions. The women, who have never before met, spend time together and become acquainted: Alma, a young nurse from Sweden who likes to take care of others; Laura, a successful fashion photographer from New York with impaired vision; Rachael, an American woman in search of her past; Hari, a Russian girl with no memories and no specific destination; Bree, a call girl and unsuccessful actress from New York; Nana, an attractive French woman who describes herself as an "entertainer"; and Giuliana, a troubled Italian searching for a place where she will "feel better".

While they wait, the women develop relations, friendships, and animosities; they have conflicts, confide secrets to each other, and talk about their lives, loves, fears, and dreams. This moment they share turns them into accomplices, involuntary fellow travelers on a trip which takes them into their interior worlds and psyches. They become characters in a space of eternal rehearsal, suspended in a universe outside of their original scripts and lines. The plot of X Characters: RE(hers)AL does not pertain to the realm of narrative, but instead is concerned with the development of the character. As opposed to a story about a character and her experiences, it scripts the "character's story" as an ongoing production through seven brief trailers.

The Characters

Alma / Persona (Bibi Andersson; D: Ingmar Bergman, Sweden 1966)
stage actress: Kathrin Diele / chatroom actress: Nomeda Urbonas

Bree / Klute (Jane Fonda; D: Alan J. Pakula, USA 1971)
stage actress: Lotte Ohm / chatroom actress: Wendelien van Oldenborgh

Giuliana / Il Deserto Rosso (Monica Vitti; D: Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy 1964)
stage actress: Judith van der Werff / chatroom actress: Patricia Grzonka

Hari / Solaris (Natalya Bondarchuk; D: Andrei Tarkovski, USSR 1972)
stage actress: Katrin Heller / chatroom actress: Christa Blümlinger

Laura / Eyes of Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway; D: Irvin Kershner, USA 1978)
stage actress: Cornelia Heyse / chatroom actress: Marina Faust

Nana / Vivre sa vie (Anna Karina; D: Jean-Luc Godard, France 1962)
stage actress: Annika Kuhl / chatroom actress: Regina Möller

Rachael / Blade Runner (Sean Young; D: Ridley Scott, USA 1982)
stage actress: Susanna Kraus / chatroom actor: Mark Rakatansky

Script

X Characters / RE(hers)AL

Project Website

http://www.zkm.de/~ruhm/Xcharacters/rehersal