Snakes & Funerals

An inter-disciplinary collaboration between Dr. Emily Jeremiah (Royal Holloway University), Professor James Williams (Royal Holloway University) and Gillian Wylde (Falmouth University) producing a 14-minute film, Snakes&Funerals. The title refers to Fritz Lang’s dismissive comment playing himself in Le Mépris: ‘Cinemascope — it’s only good for snakes and funerals!’ Wylde created the film for ‘Queer The Space’, a year-long project engaging artists, academics, activists, performers, and writers to questions spatiality and orientation through the London Centre for Collaborative Research., The work interprets such queer theorists as Sara Ahmed (Queer Phenomenology) and Judith Halberstam (In a Queer Time and Place). Snakes&Funerals takes Jean-Luc Godard’s canonical Le Mépris (1963) as a starting-point to explore queer disordering of cinematic space and soundtrack through eliding established configurations of narrative and gender. The work expands on Wylde’s interest in film procedures, experimenting with postproduction techniques of editing; colourisation, split screen, cross-cuts, jump-cuts and match cutting re-explored to disrupt a standard cinematic reading. Sound and image were separately developed and brought together in encounters interrogating languages, landscapes, cultures, and aesthetics all characterised by chance, indeterminacy and refusal of the ‘natural’ and ‘logical.’ In this queer deconstruction of a work by one of cinema’s most aggressively heterosexual directors, the orchestral theme Camille by Georges Delerue (the pathos of which Godard never took seriously) joins a Finnish folk song (The Sky is Blue and White, sung by Emily Jeremiah), as the expression of the modern couple is propelled into multi-sensate voids.