Iconography of Venus, The

A look at private and public images of women and their “place” in society. The act of being placed on a visual pedestal of unrealistic proportions and its accompanying expectations. The operatic soundtrack written by the filmmaker is performed by Suzanne Palmer. “Photographs of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, the Venus de Milo and Venus of Willendorf achieve their stunning resolution in the Louvre where a crowd waits for the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa to break into speech, to recover the distance betweeen her sitting and the time of our approach. What we watch with the filmmaker is not the painting at all but the people looking at it, as if a gaze were simply a pretext for looking, and that we had found in this inscrutable design a cipher for the body’s submission to its own eye. As they track acoss the screen we wonder how those man-made Venus’ relate to the body of the filmmaker, or the body of the camera as it moves throughout its surround, looking for a scratch to start from.” – Mike Hoolboom