Stills from Body of The Beast
This semester I created a video project based on reflections of the changing world around me. The video is a compilation of footage gathered from my daily life– the road work outside my house, the nature preserve, the dance studio, and my bedroom. The audio of the project is an improv original song, where I sing and play the guitar. In the song I sing about “the body of the beast”, which I see as the capitalist, patriarchal, racist, and oppressive underpinnings of the United States. I’ve thought a lot about the expression of “the beast” as it relates to my experiences bearing witness to the impacts of climate change and the experience of sexual trauma. Our personal experiences are almost always connected to a larger story, a story that for many of us contains cycles of abuse and resilience within oppressive systems. In this project I am interested in approaching how those systems have affected me emotionally and how to challenge them.
The opening lyrics are: “We’ll play pretend/until we lose our shit” – these lyrics are meant to point out how we ignore or cover up injustices and environmental realities until we cannot afford to anymore–i.e. we “lose our shit”. We will pretend things are okay until we can’t pretend anymore.
The video starts with shaky footage of road work outside, with harsh noises and men talking. The machinery to me symbolizes this “beast”. Then it jumps to the nature preserve at dusk, and you can hear bits of conversation between me and a friend. The contrast between machinery and nature was important to me in order to showcase how these two different things oppose each other. I wanted to communicate a feeling of nostalgia in the nature preserve shots, because it often feels that these spaces are disappearing.
Some of the last shots are of me in my bedroom staring down the camera. I wanted these shots to represent the eyes of a person who is trying to both critically witness and dynamically engage in the world around her. I wanted the viewer to feel witnessed. To me, the eye contact is almost like a challenge– to myself and others– to listen, change, and bear witness to this beast around and inside us.
-Claire Goldstein