The starting point for this film was Kleist’s tragedy Penthesilea, with the first of the five parts of this film presenting the pantomimic representation of the play filmed with a fixed camera. In the second part, the silent theatre is followed by the verbal language (spoken and written) of the directors, and then, in the third part, a complex series of images (paintings, sculptures, bas-reliefs and comic strips) refers to the iconography of the Amazons. The fourth part presents one of the first films about women’s suffrage, What 80 Million Women Want (1913), superimposed with the face of a woman speaking the words of the feminist Jessie Ashley (1861-1919). The fifth and final part contains the image of four video screens presenting the four previous sections. Each part of the film is made up of a continuous shot, a 16-mm reel of approximately 20 minutes. In this way, the length of each reel meant that, in Penthesilea, shape and structure created just the right space to show the overlaps between the different images and versions of the myth of Amazon women throughout history.
Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons, 1974, 16mm, 98 min, original version with Catalan subtitles.
Digital screening. Copy provided by the BFI, courtesy of Laura Mulvey.
