Keeping it Punk in Experimental and Ethnographic Filmmaking——Peggy AHWESH
Written by Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin LIU
I’m delighted to hear that this year’s WMWIFF features Peggy AHWESH in the “Master in Focus Playhouse” program. I first met AHWESH in 2016 at the California Institute of the Arts when she participated in screenings and discussions there as a visiting artist. This enigmatic and multifaceted filmmaker wowed everyone. She is a feminist with bold and interesting ideas, as well as a practitioner of experimental filmmaking.
Over her 40 year career, AHWESH has used a multitude of media for her films such as Super 8 film, 16mm film, Pixelvision, found footage, appropriated film, video games, VR, and digital media. The aesthetics and genre of her films border on non-traditional, non-commercial, and non-industrial. Nothing about the composition, lighting, actors, or scripts are conventional. The blending of genres transcends simple categorizations like documentary, narrative film, or essay film. AHWESH’s films move beyond technical skills to present questions or reflections on life. Through her lens, we see how she tackles gender issues, and how she moves beyond the confines of popular culture or social tradition. AHWESH is like an ethnographic filmmaker navigating through domestic and urban spaces. With her camera open-minded and eyes sharp, each of her films are like observatory notes. By engaging with her layered and interwoven content and narratives, we gradually gain a deeper understanding of AHWESH’s works. In her own words: “The filming style is of the ethnographic film without the expert observer and of the home movie without the father.”
AHWESH prefers having women tell women’s stories, often shooting in domestic settings. The home is the private garden for many. They can oversee everything—the color of the carpet, the spider webs in the corner, the running speed of the washing machine, the noise level of the refrigerator, the diapers and storybooks, every happy holiday, every bruise and scratch, all clearly understood. Home movies directly oppose commercial cinema, excluding grandiose cinematic settings, professional lighting, experienced actors, script rehearsals, and market manipulation. With one camera that can be operated by a single person, the captured images are always imperfect, cramped, and often rough with noise. However, it is precisely for these reasons that home movies can be most authentic and free. Therefore, as a creative form, it can also transcend limitations and create more opportunities for those who have little accessibility to filmmaking due to political or financial reasons.
AHWESH is particularly concerned with the politics of how women are represented. Indecent, obscene, vulgar, sexually unrestrained—these are words that have long defined the representation of women and threatened their self-identity. Women are also often portrayed as merely beautiful. AHWESH not only rejects all of these labels, but emphasizes female jouissance. In her narratives, women are not passive. They do not have to be gentle or dignified. They can be rebellious, plain, even dirty, ugly, or unlikable. The female nude body is not a work of art in a museum display. Nudity is not necessarily beautiful or romantic like in mainstream movies. Sex is not shameful, secretive, or sinful. From the 1980s to 1990s, AHWESH’s works, albeit shocking, were also powerful counter attacks to the mainstream culture of their times.
However, it is not enough to just resist. It is crucial to also effectively combat women’s “to-be-looked-at-ness,” reverse the position of women being the sexual object in Hollywood visual culture, and change the idea that women belong to a passive existence. In one of her found footage films, AHWESH reexamines and recreates erotic content, putting female characters at the forefront and rethinking the subject-object dynamic. Unlike the typical male gaze, her film presents female desire from a female director’s perspective. The discarded rain-soaked film is corroded and peeling, revealing an exquisite, breathtaking color, as if new skin had emerged.
Transitioning into the digital era, AHWESH continued to express her observations, worries, and thoughts through video arts. In the virtual world, differences between people no longer seem absolute at first glance and there are infinite possibilities to surpass traditional gender boundaries. But challenges persist. The tech-enhanced artificial world has become increasingly harsh, with rising pollution indexes, ongoing conflicts, and pervasive violence. The boundaries between the virtual world and reality are blurring. AHWESH gathers many online materials—video game footage, news clips, virtual reality videos, and CGI images—and blends them with her social observations to create a surreal synthetic visual space. In this space, distinctions between agents and pawns, players and viewers, also become increasingly ambiguous. Does this not mirror modern life?
It’s incredible how AHWESH’s works remain honest observations and reflections of life. Over 40 years later, she is still the same ethnographer with a camera, exploring themes of life and death. Her work encompasses curiosity, humor, punk spirit, confusion, sadness, romanticism, and above all, restlessness. Through experimental films, she invites viewers to experience and witness it all.
(translated by Nicole WONG)
