NYU Undergraduate Film and Television &
NYU Cinema Studies present
the 4th Annual Experimental Lecture
PARLER FEMME
by Filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh
“The impulse in my work is always somewhere between the playground and the academy. I think of myself as an idea person but also someone who loves thinking through materials. I pay serious attention to play – investigating the codes of behavior, body language, power games, gender roles and the codes involved in how we perform who we are and how we operate in society. Female subjectivity, the mundane, the unfinished, the improvised and the discourses of fantasy and desire are subjects of my work. The characters in my films are often stand-ins for myself- outsiders who are on their own path. Lately my work serves as a “memory aid” and a form of (self) preservation, to order the eccentric and diverse materials I have accumulated from travels, pilgrimages, quests, intellectual tours and research trips. Sometimes ordinary, sometimes unusual, collected images and objects offer solace about the past and help predict the future. In BETHLEHEM (2009) I work through my personal archive of accumulated footage, editing together memories like a string of pearls with a bittersweet memory of home. The APE OF NATURE (2010) is about memory and the uncanny. The performers, under hypnosis, communicate with “the other side,” telling the tale of a dystopic future informed by the power of suggestion and the unconscious.”
This event is free and open to the public.