Supersweet

Interview 

Georgina Starr

Georgina Starr has been exhibiting large-scale film and video works in the UK and internationally for the past 14 years. Her diverse body of work has incorporated video, film, animation, photography, music, writing and performance, explore the relationship between history and memory; attempting to extract meaning from collapsing realities, she makes complex and obsessive investigations into invisible, lost or fragile phenomena. SUPERSWEET’s Poppy Sorrell-Hayashi interviews her hero-ine...

SS: How intense was your preparation for Theda (2006-7)? Did you do any sort of method acting for the role?
Georgina Starr: I did a lot of research. The first year was nearly all reading and researching, and I just tried to try find any film footage from the lost films and images of her – that was the main thing. But I didn’t really have anything as far as acting coaching. The idea was just to research Theda Bara and silent film acting techniques in general. Then I started making costumes and building the sets, then every day I was dressing as her and wearing the elaborate make-up. I was filming everyday probably for about 3 or 4 months. Initially I did plan to do a scene from each of her 40 lost films – so it was really quite ambitious – but as I started filming I realised it was less about making a list and just working through it , it became more about how to perform and use expression without the use of words: vocalising her language and using a sort of pure silence. Also I didn’t use a camera person or a crew. There was nobody else involved.  I’m not an actress so it was much more about working in a very intuitive way. Have you seen the piece?

Theda, 2006

SS: I’ve seen clips of it but not the fully finished version.
Georgina: There are two parts to the film. There’s the beginning section which is called Prelude and that is a 12 minute single take of just my face. Theda Bara was called ‘the woman of a thousand faces’ and I had this idea I would try and film myself with as many different facial gestures as possible without any editing, just one single shot. That ended up taking up a lot of time. I kept thinking it was never good enough, not real enough. I spent weeks trying to perfect each take and in the end I got a 12 minute shot which I was happy with. The second part (Act) is a a series of short scenes which make a kind of narrative, again I was acting straight to camera alone, this was a really important part of my working process.

SS: Did you find it quite strange?
Georgina: The process really made me realise that it was less to do with Theda Bara and her films and more to do with myself and performance. It was actually physically exhausting but also really exciting, because I would often have to force myself to be in the mood to perform every day.

SS: So did you have to force yourself to get up early every day?
Georgina: It varied. For many years I was a total workaholic, up at 5am. I think now it depends on my moods. When I was making Theda I was working every day. I worked mostly nights too because I needed to have total  black out (for filming) so I’d prepare during the day and only film when it got dark. It became all about night and day. The texture of the film was supposed to be quite dark and sinister and the night shooting brought something to my performance.

SS: Picasso once said, “One must distrust and destroy one’s own painting and do it over and over. Even when an artist destroys a beautiful creation he doesn’t completely do away with it.  How does that relate to sculptures you smashed at your recent opening in Italy (see here)?
Georgina: It’s an interesting quote and I do agree in some respects. I’m comfortable making and deleting. I’m frequently never so happy with anything I do.. But I think Picasso was talking more about a style, of painting or art making and that’s something I don’t really have because each project is always very different, and looks different from the last. The sculptures I made for Italy are not really relevant in this context because they were actually made to be destroyed. The story behind the sculptures comes from a scene in a Theda Bara movie. In many of her films she played the lover or model of an artist. In one particular film, called Forbidden Path, the artist falls in love with her and makes a sculpture of her as “Beauty’. Then during the course of the film her life falls apart and she’s absolutely destroyed. So years later he finds her and makes a sculpture of as ‘Decrepitude’ and she sees the art work and she’s completely devastated and smashes it up. The actual Bara film no longer exists. So the work was inspired by the idea of loss, on many different levels; loss of an artwork, loss of youth and loss of life.

SS: Do you still walk around London listening to horror movie soundtracks?
Georgina: I have to say that I’ve not done this for a while. I started when I first moved here to Hackney Wick. The whole building was empty when I first moved in and I was constantly paranoid and nervous. I’ve always hated horror movies and when I moved in here it was something I believed I had to face. It’s also very beautiful around here on the canals, so I’d walk round listening to the soundtrack of a horror movie (Susperia by Argento was my favourite) and it was amazing, the contrast of the sound and the visuals and the way the sound changed the way I looked at my surroundings. The ‘horror soundtrack listening’ was a precursor to the Bunny Lake series of works I made from 2000-04. I watched a lot Dario Argento as well as other thriller films, which I became completely obsessed with. I love the way Argento makes films, even though there’s outrageous horror, there’s also something else always going on, the camp and the glamour…in that way for me it’s beyond horror.

SS: You think you’ve conquered the fear then?
Georgina: I think I pretty much have. I still avoid certain sorts of horror. It’s not my genre at all. The Bunny Lake works came from somewhere else, somewhere more personal. These works were rooted in my memory of an old thriller film I’d seen as a teenager..

SS: At the end of Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing we discover that the girl’s been in the trunk of the car the whole time and the mother’s sanity is in question. Is that a commentary on society or is it purely revenge?
Georgina: My Bunny Lake works are only inspired by the original film, many of the the ideas for the works came from different sources. The original Preminger film and another film I’d seen as a teenager, Bogdanovich’s Targets were important, but as the works evolved other stories filtered in. I watched the original Bunny Lake is Missing film when I was 14 babysitting my younger sister, and when I watched it years later it made me think a lot about my sister who was adopted. So I mixed the memory of the film with my very complex relationship to my sister. The character (Bunny Lake) is abandoned and kidnapped and locked in the boot of a car. This didn’t happen to my sister, but the fact that she’d been abandoned by her real parents, I made a connection between her and the fictional Bunny Lake. So there was a lot of personal stories that went into the Bunny Lake work, again this idea of loss, rejection and neglect. And also the idea of being saved, or not wanting to be saved. There’s this really beautiful Jean Renoir film called Boudu Saved From Drowning. It’s about a tramp who is about to commit suicide but is taken in by a family who try to ‘save’ him. They give him clothes and money and a ‘better life ‘ because that’s what they believe he needs.. But at the end of the movie he still kills himself. All along he just really wanted to die, he didn’t want to be saved.

SS: So do you believe in fate?
Georgina: I believe we can create our own fate, in the same that we create prisons for ourselves through our own psychology.

SS: You said once that film is like a mirror and we use it to escape reality.
Georgina: For me the screen is like a mirror. When we look into the mirror or the film screen, we see what we want to see. There are various psychological things that happen when people look into a mirror, whether they think they look beautiful or grotesque and I think it’s quite similar with the film screen. We often put into the film what we want to get back out of it. There’s that transferral that happens when you sit and watch in a dark room with nothing else distracting you. I’m also interested in the idea of searching for yourself in the faces on the screen. You can transform into the heroine or the villan, so in a way it’s about escaping out of yourself but it’s also reflected back at you.

SS: Do you consider your art to be about escapism?
Georgina: No. I think it’s the opposite from escapism, because I think I use the work to reveal, rather than escape.

SS: As an artist, do you try and push boundaries?
Georgina: Yes but it’s more to do with personal boundaries rather than social boundaries. I need to challenge myself and the work I make has to challenge me in some way.

SS: Is there anyone that you consider to be your mentor?
Georgina: I’ve never really had mentors. I’m not very good at taking advice. I like giving it. I’m quite stubborn! I don’t being criticised because I like to judge for myself if it’s the right or wrong thing to do. It’s part of the work to make mistakes.

SS: What’s the weirdest object you’ve ever found? Was it the letter to ‘Erik’ you found on a bridge in Amsterdam?
Georgina: It was really weird to find this very personal note to someone called ‘Erik’ written in foreign language. It was almost like a work of art in itself because it was written on a cigar box. I’d just started to live in Holland at the time, so finding it was a really good way of getting to meet people and hear their stories about who they thought ‘Erik’ could be. Finding the letter was like a key into a world of stories about this one man, the stories together built a sort of ‘Super Erik’. It eventually led to quite a large work (Erik (1994)) with sound, text and drawings. It also led to the next work I made Getting To Know You (1995) where I got to know a man through all these different psychic phenomenon without ever meeting him. I used graphology, numerology, palm reading etc to uncover his personality. That was more fascinating really because at the end of it there was a real person I could actually meet and talk to about my findings.

SS: Can you give us any hints about what you’re working on now then?
Georgina: I can’t right now it too early. Also where it stands now, it could all change… I’ll definitely be doing something totally different from Theda though.

Words: Poppy Sorrell-Hayashi
All photos (c) Georgina Starr