Passion Crucified

“Passion Crucified” is an episodic rite of passage rendered in tableau style. Part creation myth, part medieval science fiction, it enacts a typology of the body – offering us glimpses of Adam, Eve, Christ and Joan of Arc. Together they are figured as subterranean ideals, which continue to haunt us, even as they provide the means by which we might come to understand our own bodies. Begun as a dance performance, Torossian recasts her naked charge into a series of phantasmagoric settings – trees whose fruit show the faces of Medici children, drunken underground rooms filled with a rotting, natural detritus, medieval triptychs and coffins. Every where the body staggers beneath the weight of its own representations, surrounded by images which threaten to engulf or convert it, turning it into one more instance of a Christian paradigm the filmmaker insists is inevitable. “Passion Crucified” opens with Adam alone, crawling against a blank ground, attempting to forestall the flood of representation, which will dissolve his flesh into the infinite reproductions of the image. In the film’s second section, Eve appears, her every gesture doubled via electronic processing, each frame bisected with a mirrored crease, which offers identical vantages left and right. Eve’s split inaugurates a cascade of pictures with which each of the film’s protagonists will have to contend, and then finally become. Eve gives way to a section entitled “The Genealogy of Christ,” its serial announcements of succession (Adam begat Jacob begat…) appear as text superimposed over a sleeping Christ figure. This dream of naming conjures the body as historical issue, its flesh a blank receptor for Christian litanies. Rising from his slumber, Christ opens the gilded doors of his retreat and begins a strange, terrible dance. His stomach massively distended, as if he’d swallowed the line of his succession, he turns in a slow motion wind of torment before entering a world of picture galleries. Paintings of a suffering Christ frame his own gestures, and then are projected overtop of him, as he takes his place in the image world. The next two sections concern Joan of Arc, the matriarch who dressed as a man in order to do battle. In an allegorical reprise, Torossian pictures her burning in mirrored and symmetrical flames, made to endure the punishment reserved for those who cannot make their peace with Christian ideals. Our bodies remain bent to the rule of the Word, its apertures of opening and closing have admitted a history of looking which few remain cognizant of, no matter how diligently they apply its principles. In her steadfast deconstruction of old world ideals, and her stunning reassemblage of the very images that made them possible, Torossian’s imaginary historyscapes posit a place where the body might escape its disciplines of understanding, and appear again to its beholders.