Geography of the Body

A quotation from Aristophanes, "The desire and pursuit of the whole is called love," precedes views of a man and a woman's bodies.

Of course, the first thing that struck me about this film was the showing of nudity in the 1940s. While all we see is a pair of breasts, and it is tastefully and artfully done, I am still surprised that this was apparently acceptable. I generally think photography (or film) is not considered as artistic as a painting.

I like the use of the word "geography" in the title, because this is truly what we see -- by having extreme close-ups, the director has made the familiar foreign and a simple body part come across as a sprawling landscape. This feeling of the "foreign" is even more enhanced when combined with the running commentary -- if there is a connection between the narrator's talk of jellyfish with the faculty of speech and three nude bodies, I simply do not see it.

I have also never found the tongue quite so repulsive as I do here. Not that the person has a terribly repulsive tongue, but just the manner of filming seems to make it gross. Sure, if you think about it, the tongue is a rather dirty organ... but never have I thought that so much as now.

A truly original film breaking down our bodies, or to be exact parts of them into fragments. Neither genitalia or faces are shown, and this makes the film even more curious to watch. I would give it a ten but for George Barker's intoning voice of words that seemed to me to have little to add to what is shown. I watched it twice, first with the poetic ramblings perhaps fine in themselves but not needed, then in preferable silence. I saw silently the visual impact of orifices, two of which I could not recognise, or other parts that I could. I realised that my body is strange to me as it is for everyone except the determined examiner or narcissist. A single eye, male or female and it did not matter. I realised my eye sees very little of me and even lovers do not explore as much. A weird feeling that. We may have a desire for the whole of someone, but both the inner organs or the outer protective covering will be always unknown land and taken in parts as here even horrific. The tongue that slithers out and the thick lips that open to let it protrude or retreat, like a snail. An inner part for love or simply surgical examination ? One for love; the second aspect for health or sickness. David Lynch seemed suddenly superficial showing only fabricated mysteries. Willard Maas shows mysteries that exist on all of us and shows the roving tongue from within is capable of attack or kiss. The female breast looked defiant, and from the side appeared whole, but what would it be like from the front ? A masterpiece of imagination and verified truth.

Abstraction is one of the key attributes in many avant-garde short films; the constant subversion and altering of ritualistically accepted objects and subjects is something that finds itself present in these films to the point where sometimes the only extractable emotion for the audience when watching them is alienation and frustration. Willard Maas's Geography of the Body, a seven minute short film shot with the help of Maas's wife, filmmaker Marie Menken, who is responsible for various collage-driven abstract works, works to add that same layer of abstraction and visual confusion to one of the most commonly seen and accepted principles of our lives - our body, its features, and its perplexities.

For seven minutes, Maas lingers on extreme close-up shots of the human body; everything from armpits, legs, and even lips with evident beard stubble below them are profiled in immaculate detail. Narration exists for the entire experience, but it largely feels like it's talking in endless circles of philosophy and confusion rather than coming to a clear and discernible point. The real interesting element comes from watching Maas's camera not really define nor emphasize, but simply linger on the various textures of the human body, almost making it a foreign animal after a while, like staring at a word for too long and feeling like it's spelled wrong or doesn't make sense.

Avant-garde films, as a generalized whole, get us to question two things and those things are ideas or objects we've come to accept without question - be them physical or ideological - or what we can adequately and appropriately call a film. Maas finds middle-ground with that sentiment in Geography of the Body by superimposing and lingering on unique shots of the human exterior rather than analyzing it as it is.

Directed by: Willard Maas.