Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Charming for the Revolution, 2009
Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz
Charming for the Revolution

The collaborative works of Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz (who collaborate since 2007) often revisit materials from the past. They make references to and excavate unrepresented or illegible moments of queer/feminist subversion in history. The majority of their works incorporate performances. Their regular collaboration with performers (such as Werner Hirsch aka Antonia Baehr (see also BAE 1), Vaginal Davis, Yvonne Rainer (see also RAI 1) and Wu Ingrid Tsang)) and their technique of shooting long sequences of performances without interruptions or cuts gives their performances a certain autonomy. And yet the films do not function as re-enactments or as performance documentation. Rather, they stage, edit, remix and repeat actions and contagious gestures which can draw relations between different times, thus revealing possibilities for a queer futurity.

artists' website: https://www.boudry-lorenz.de/

The film is charming, but it is still labour. The labour to engage in demanding what should already be ours.” With a wink to Jack Smith, the New York underground performer and filmmaker from the 60s to the 80s, and to the history of queer and feminist slogans, such as “wages for housework!”, Charming for the Revolution recreates the housewife as an ambiguous figure with an open future. Additional references extend from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “becoming–animal”, the Dandy of the 19th century — who out of protest against the clock pulse of industrialisation walked turtles on leashes, as Walther Benjamin described him — to Pasolini’s ironic film criticising capitalism, The Hawks and the Sparrows.

Performance: Werner Hirsch
Director of Photography: Bernadette Paassen
Sound: Karin Michalski
Sound Design: Rashad Becker
Set Photography: Andrea Thal
Produced in connection with the festival “Live Film! Jack Smith!” Berlin 2009

Texts: Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

Courtesy Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

Document media
16mm film, colour, sound, 11:00 min

Issue date
2009

Relations
Antonia Baehr (BAE 1)
Yvonne Rainer (RAI 1)

Tags
be-coming, human/non-human animals, labour, manifesto, queer/drag, resistance