Marry, Fuck, Kill

2019 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
13:50 minutes

Historical representations of the female form and the clichés and misunderstandings that surround them have been the subject of recent research and historical revision. Marry, Fuck, Kill by Ruth Patir reimagines sculptures of fertility goddesses from ancient times as real-life women by animating them as a moving sculptural bodies. In a country such as Israel, where the presence of ancient ruins are common, if not everyday for some, this work speaks both to the present and the distant past, and draws continuities between. To produce the film, Patir adopted technologies common to video games and cinema CGI to record the physical/spatial movements of her mother and herself, allowing her to transpose them into animated sculptural figurines. The sculptures date back to the time of the Israelites’ first temple in 528 BC. The repurposing of this animation technology and the intimate dialogue between mother and daughter creates a space where alternative feminist perspectives are shared as a form of time-travel. The video concludes with a small figurine, held between the fingers of Patir, that reanimates to sing a song from the Grease soundtrack (made for the 1978 film adaptation of the 1971 musical). “There Are Worse Things I Could Do” depicts the tough outspoken character of Rizzo, who, realizing that she may be pregnant, is responding to the things people say about her, vulnerable and nuanced in contrast to her outward image. Patir is borrowing another more recent history to talk about long standing issues for women.

Ruth Patir works with video and performances that complicate facile separations of public and private spheres. Patir experiments with new technologies as a way to rethinking filmic narrative, often addressing and disrupting gender paradigms and exploring the aesthetics of power.

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