Rewind: Althea Thauberger
Artspeak, Vancouver
Female Victoria filmmaker seeks female singer/songwriters ages approximately 1725 to be featured in art film. No experience necessary. This was an ad that Althea Thauberger placed two years ago in an entertainment weekly. The result was Songstress, her film (transferred to DVD) of eight young women performing their own earthy love songs within lush natural settings in the Victoria area.
Thauberger is interested in how young women are inspired by and made marketable within the pop-music industry, which has had a propensity for lauding anorexic diva vocalists and dreadlocked female folk singers. The film is consistent with this tradition, as it is with the hackneyed vision that places woman in close proximity to nature, those unbridled forces equated with tumultuous emotions.
Working in photography and film, Thaubergers focus has been the grand myth of nature, the return or retreat to nature. Whether in terms of roughing it in the bush in avid pursuit of the West Coast outdoor thing or just performing for the camera in a natural setting, her work investigates the constructed relationship that humans have with the outdoors. For her, nature is the sublime backdrop against which people dramatize a human condition made slightly ridiculous by self-importance and privilege.
The film finds its edge in the fact that the young women willingly participated in it without having a familiarity with the art audience who would see it. Thauberger borders on being patronizing with the sheer vulnerability of these women. The way they are filmed, in one continuous takeno zooms or editshelps demythologize the packaging of popular music within music videos. As a result, one is inclined to sympathize with these women and their misguided hopes and ambitions, their talent notwithstanding. I assume that most viewers feel pity and embarrassment for these women and their sincerity of delivery before an unforgiving technical and theoretical eye. They are so obviously manipulated by the choice of setting, the use of unedited footage and Thaubergers offering the film up for scrutiny by a culture-savvy art audience.
This exploitative quality is what is most interesting about the film. It contrasts the notion of a marketable look against the powerlessness of unrecognized talent. However heartfelt their intentions, few of the singers seem promising in a marketable sense, and the homogeneity of their songs and their dress also points to the homogeneity of the industry. One senses that they have put themselves in an awkward position in order to make themselves known, yet they have no control over how they are portrayed.
The art-venue context for the films exhibition proffers a subtle critique of the culture industry. The songs, the womens images and their body languages make one uncomfortable, even irritated. Yet one is thankful that Thauberger has turned them into unwitting clowns or fools. They are fools serving as artful messengers of a social criticism.
Spring 2003
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