Turning: The Music of Antony and the Johnsons
This post was written by DOC NYC blogger Iva Radivojevic
Musician Antony Hegarty at the screening of the film TURNING.
What would it feel like to have complete freedom from society, from art, from gender, from everything that oppresses us? For a brief moment, the women in Charles Atlas’s film, TURNING, are given that experience.
The film is a collaboration between Atlas and Antony Hegarty (of the music group Antony & the Johnsons) and follows the latter on the European tour of his performance piece Turning. For the performance, Antony invited thirteen women from his community that he most admires to join him. During the performance, each woman was given time on the stage–a rotating platform intended to represent “the turning.” Their close ups are simultaneously projected on the big screen behind the band in a hypnotic, abstract collage.
The women are young, old, straight, queer, transgender, and of varying ethnicities. Their bond is their womanhood; they are “womanizing womanizers.” While the performance itself focuses on images and music, the film delves deeper by introducing its characters in a series of intimate and poignant interviews about their life experience.
The performances offer viewers a way of witnessing and appreciating each of them. In turn, the film articulates a feeling that presided over the performances that could not be articulated during the tour: a sense of freedom, dignity and beauty. It’s a celebration of femininity in its many different interpretations.
In the Q & A following the screening, Atlas credited the music and its spirit for allowing him to enter a world of beauty. Antony explained that in his world, “Everything is moving toward the feminine,” adding that “the turning” was a search for something essential, a transcendental state, a dervish-like hypnotic quality in which something is looked at for so long that it becomes luminous.
TURNING opens at the IFC Center on Friday Nov. 16 and runs until Nov. 22.
Iva Radivojevic is a documentary filmmaker. Follow what she’s up to at www.ivaasks.com.
