One of the more interesting vocations in the film industry is the Foley Artist. Foley Artists are the percussionists behind all of the sounds you hear in any given film: telephones, doorbells, doors, thunderstorms, ocean waves, gunfire, fists (jaw? stomach? mirror?), barks and meows and roars, setting a plate, or a glass, or an anvil on a dining room table. You can record the real thing as it happens, but that’s not a sound you can then adjust much. Computers and synthesizers are good for many things, but sounds created from other objects and materials from the real world, by human artists, are almost infinitely alterable to be exactly what the director, or sound designer or pushy producer wants to hear.
In the superb and subversive Piaffe (Germany, 2022), trans artist Zara (Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau) is a foley artist with their own small studio, but they’ve recently been institutionalized. Their sister (and assistant) Eva (an entrancing Simone Bucio) is tasked to pick up an account where Zara left off; a pharmaceutical company has shot a costly but beautiful ad promoting its newest opiate, “Equili.” They’re using short scenes of a horse in dressage to evoke both the delicacy and the controlled power of the drug’s efficacy. (“The piaffe is a dressage movement where the horse is in a highly collected and cadenced trot, in place or nearly in place.”) Eva spends a long night in the studio clopping coconuts into dirt and jingling metal rings in the air and against her teeth, and delivers the tapes the next day. But the commercial’s producer thinks they’re terrible: “A machine made this. I need a human…” So Eva is back to the drawing board, as it were, redoubling her efforts, her resolve, and her empathy and understanding for her equine movie star. She goes to a stable to research and experience the real thing, then agonizes over each and every aural detail of every motion and point of contact between objects in the ad footage. Her heightened work ethic, and sensibilities, compel her to some great Foley work. And, unpredictably but, apparently, agreeably, Eva starts to grow a tail.
Despite her introversion, Eva’s no stranger to science and scientific inquiry in general – one of her day-jobs is as an attendant at a revolving display of plant life (a photoplasticon). The specimens are on a carousel, and each plant is observable through magnifying lenses stationed at seats around the display in order to study growth changes over a period of time; cilia undulate, leaves unfurl and extend, buds blossom in fractal precision. One frequent visitor is a botanist, Dr. Novak (Sebastian Rudolph) – she and he exchange glances, but are generally businesslike – that is, until her tail appears. Then Eva pays him a visit, bearing for him a vase of roses. They start a very intimate, kinky (but primarily silent) relationship, and Eva starts to explore her own relationship with her freshly augmented body. “Our concepts of male and female are insufficient to understand ferns,” he explains. “Ferns produce both sperm and eggs.” Animal instincts, and identities, and genders, turn out to perhaps be oddly malleable, something Zara certainly embodies as well. Eva is most certainly a human female animal, but her new equine influences are enhancing her as well – she frequents a dance club, and steps and prances to the thudding, driving beats of the club’s music. And she never hides her tail – it sways proudly behind her whether she’s in white slacks or it flips coyly from under her skirt hems.
There are some relatively kinky ideas here, and genuine eroticism, but I’d recommend the film unreservedly to audiences who can handle a challenge or two – its ideas are presented boldly but artfully. There’s very little speech throughout the film, but other sounds are crucial, and abundant. Director Ann Orem (with Thais Guisasola as co-writer) is expert at purely visual expression as well – much of her earlier work involved video and visual art installations, and each element in the film (her first feature) is designed and composed brilliantly.
There’s a branch of scientific inquiry that involves exploring and/or counteracting the institutional masculinization of much scientific information, through inadvertent or deliberate sexism and an overreliance on digital technologies. Muriel Del Don, in her Cineuropa article, points to Donna Haraway’s work in these fields as instructive – views on evolution and gender are becoming more expansive as a result – and it’s a perspective Ann Orem and her film shares to a fair extent. There are also parallels here to the work of David Cronenberg and Peter Strickland, but the film is Orem’s own unique work, through and through. Piaffe, indeed, may not get much U.S. distribution, but it’s featured at a number of film festivals (including the recent Chicago Int’l Film Festival, where it was one of my favorites) and I’m hoping it’ll see regular runs in U.S. art houses soon.
Periscope In The Bathtub 