Magazine

Marie M. Martino is an emerging video maker and visual artist based in Chicago.  Martino received her M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in the spring of 2007 and has recently shown work at such venues as the 2007 Estrojam Music and Culture Festival and The National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington D.C .  Martino served on the Board of Directors for the non-profit, Women in the Director’s Chair from 2002 through 2006, where she also held tenure as the organization’s Acting Technical Coordinator and worked on the film festival programming committee.  She is a second-generation, Italian-American who was raised in the near western suburbs of Chicago.

MC: I’ve had the pleasure of screening your two brilliant films, Strip and Foreign Bodies, and the first thing I want to ask you about is their formal complexity. It seems to me that your films really demand more than one viewing. They work by way of a raw power combined with a delicate assemblage—a kind of intricate collage-work made up of different genres of film (e.g., home movies, documentary, abstract footage) and with that, different versions or layers of “reality.” In a way, your films are the opposite of lyrical: their power resides in their being raw, rough, and discordant. In Strip, for example, the literal act of your family ripping up (or “stripping”) linoleum is played against a metaphoric version of yourself wanting to “strip” off layers of clothing at the same time that the sound and images work together violently to expose something. How do you understand the relationships your work is forging between these different registers or types of footage, and whom do you imagine as your audience in an age dominated by speed and sound-bytes?

MM: Oftentimes, during the holidays or whenever the family is gathered together, my father will play old home movies—some of it’s in Super 8 and the rest are in various video formats that he, and subsequently, I, shot through the years. On one level, this family ritual of watching these old movies—covering everything from holidays, to familial events, to school plays, and even more mundane camera play--is a way for the family to bond, embrace youth, and remember “happier” past times. These movies definitely work in a way to document and maintain the family legacy, perhaps, though in a somewhat illusory way. 

Seeing those movies now, as an adult, particularly as a queer woman, is totally eye-opening. Sure, there’s the nostalgia and a sort of sweet sentiment present on the surface, but so much more is actually unfolding on screen. There’s a rich and dynamic, fully-loaded narrative there that goes beyond, say, little Frankie’s 6^th birthday party, to which the time-based mediums of film/video really lend themselves. So, viewed outside the context of home movies, it is plain to see sex and gender issues being played out, the accidental “queerness” of family life, the evolution of identities, and the complexities of relationships that, when originally filmed, the person behind the camera did not necessarily intend to capture. Fascinated by what I saw, I began mining the family footage and inevitably introduced it into my work. Inspired by this, I wanted to go out and capture more footage, even more mundane. 

Interestingly, I found myself in this really complicated position as subject, reader, and maker all at once. Assembling the various types of footage (documentary, home movie footage, performance, abstract) functioned as a strategy for getting this multi-faceted point of view across. The formal elements of STRIP and Foreign Bodies reflect this sort of schizophrenic, ever-shifting perspective. This work, STRIP, in particular, is purposefully raw and “messy,” rather than slick and seamless. I juxtaposed sounds and images that showed how familial and romantic relationships worked (or failed to) with images of us stripping the floor. Stripping the floor was a violent, physical process that eventually peeled away the layers, exposing the otherwise hidden foundation underneath. I think the images worked well together to express/suggest something else. In this piece, I want viewers to see the sutures, to feel the interruptions. The form reinforces the emotional feel as well as the themes of the piece. 

So far, my main audience has been art gallery or film festival crowds. Though it would be quite easy to do and would make the work much more accessible, I don’t think I am quite ready to “distribute” this kind of work online. It was not made with the intent to be seen in such a venue. Ideally, people will view it on a large screen and be engaged enough to spend some time with these pieces.

MC: Strip begins on a boldly queer note as we hear your female lover’s voice addressing you: “you’re sexy, you’re so beautiful, I love you…” And we realize that you are doing this at a family gathering and all that that implies. As the film unfolds, it’s not always clear whether you are filming yourself or if your lover is filming you. Does our knowing this matter? And how does the outside/in position of the lesbian in an Italian American family shape what you see or choose to document? I’m thinking of the fascinating way in which snippets of The L-Word are juxtaposed with the feet and legs of your parents as they discuss a Walmart purchase, or how the film is framed by your father asking you “What brings you here?” and your answering, “What generally brings me here?”, and his replying, “I don’t know.” How does queerness subsist in this domicile?

MM: Ultimately, I see STRIP and Foreign Bodies as investigations of the closet and the multi-faceted space in and around it, in the home and extending out into the public or political sphere.  My position as both insider/outsider offers me a privileged, albeit, skewed perspective. Consequently, it’s a fragmented perspective. Home tends to be complicated place (and I’m sure this is true for most people in general). But in this home, that is, in the world where the videos’ action takes place, queerness is sublimated. The domicile relegates queerness to the closet, but queerness cannot be so neatly contained. It seeps out. Actually, in some cases, it butts right up against, it inevitably collides head on with, what are representations of heteronormative values. 

While the focus is on one family, it should not be viewed in isolation.  There’s clearly a bridge between the personal and political, private and public.  In her book Authentic Ethnicities: The Interaction of Ideology, Gender Power, and Class in the Italian-American Experience, Patricia Boscia-Mule addresses the question of the alleged division between the private and public with regard to the family. In her chapter on familism, Boscia-Mule argues “ . . . the ideology of the family is given, in its concrete enactment, a paradoxical nature: because this ethos, which proclaims the primacy of the family above any other concern, is in fact subjugated to the power of outside pressures, and to the authority of a socially sanctioned family image.” The outside pressure to which she refers is part of a mass socio-political network, and holds sway over the family’s value and belief system, say the Catholic church. That said, viewing the family solely within the realm of the private obfuscates it significance as a socio-cultural construction and its relationship to ethnicity, gender, class and other socio-political phenomenon. I’m hoping the work will be viewed within a larger socio-political context.

MC: Everyone is well aware of the stereotype that affiliates Italian-ness or Italian American-ness with eating. Would you agree that in Foreign Bodies you take the ethnic stereotype of a love of food and use it instead to produce a meditation on engorgement? I’m thinking of that powerful image in the film of a throat constricting superimposed on the image of a fork twirling spaghetti. Here, the film enters a sci-fi-seeming realm. It’s as though you are trying to show how the body is subject to these ethnic rituals at a molecular level. And the food, even its preparation, rather than encourage a feeling of appetite, is grotesque. I guess one could also say that the brilliant “mockumentary” moment toward the end of the film also dramatizes a particularly insidious use of food—the language lesson that you stage in which you are shown listening through a set of headphones to prompts in Italian which you then repeat back to the anonymous voice that instructs you. The questions begin innocently enough--“Why do you want to study Italian?” “How old are you?” “Do you want to go to the cinema?” until they morph into the telling, “Does anyone know?” “How did your family react?” “Do they pretend not to know?” “Do you talk about it?” “Can your partner come over for dinner?” “Is your partner allowed in your parent’s home?” “Do they still love you?” Only to return again to questions that show food as a medium for denial, food rituals as forms of silencing:  “Please pass the bread.” “Have more spaghetti.” Can you comment on this, and are there other experimental films that have served as models for you in using film to explore eating, silencing, and the body in this way?

MM: I was definitely interested in connecting food with being Italian in a different way.  I have seen how neuroses can manifest themselves through behaviors in relation to food.  Even growing up I noticed that I had relatives with strange or unhealthy obsessions/compulsions related to eating or the preparation of food.  Though I didn’t fully understand or have the verbiage for it then, intuitively, some things felt a little off . . .

Food is very much at the center of my own family life.  In fact, it has been the most accessible way to connect to my Italian heritage.  Because food is so central to Italian identity in general, I think it’s worthwhile to consider our individual relationships to it, as well as how it is used socially. 

I was interested in the ideas of interruption, alienation, and anomaly (ie queer) in Foreign Bodies, and considered food in this light within the realm of the psychological and how it can affect the physiological. Eating food seems like a great metaphor for process and what happens when something is wrong with that process and how it is manifested physically.  How do we use food?  As a drug?  As a buffer of sorts?  And sure, there’s the idea of engorgement and perhaps, a crisis of containment, that is, holding things inside to the point of collapse.  These images are clearly sublimations of some sort of latent desire.

MC: I feel the work of other filmmakers resonating in your images: most particularly, Roberta Torre's Tano da Morire (in the scene in Foreign Bodies where the child is doing a kind of godfather imitation); Ermanno Olmi's I Fidanzati (in the scene culled from a home movie of people in a dance hall); and Scorcese's film in which his parents figure so centrally, Italian American, in the amazing shot of your parents facing forward sitting on the couch in Strip. These are some of my favorite films in an Italian/ItalianAmerican lexicon, so maybe that's why I was "finding" resonances in your films, but does the work of any of these filmmakers speak to you? Or, what filmic traditions do you draw upon to make your work? Given the long and varied tradition of feminist experimental film work by women in the US, whom do you find yourself in conversation with?

MM: To be honest, I haven’t seen most of those films you have mentioned . . . though I have seen other films by Scorcese.  Even though I work primarily in video these days, I am drawn to a more cinematic aesthetic and appreciate the work of the many "classic" and contemporary filmmakers, as well as that of the avant-garde.  I am definitely indebted to the work of new wave feminist video makers of the 90’s, particularly, Julie Zando, Sadie Benning, Elizabeth Subrin, and Jennifer Reeder.  I’d have to say that the work of early feminist videomakers of the 70’s has definitely had an influence on the choice to use performance in the works.