This Thursday evening, New York’s Merkin Hall will see the premiere of a short film that pays homage to the lesbian French artist, writer, and heroic anti-Nazi activist Claude Cahun. Two young queer artists, Margaret Singer and Max Freeman, conceived the film to accompany “Zoetrope,” a composition by Charlie Piper that will be performed live on Thursday by the contemporary music ensemble Alarm Will Sound as part of this year’s SONiC – Sounds of a New Century Festival.
I’ve known Max and Margaret for years, and I love both their work and the vibrant, queer community they’ve formed around it. The two met in Boston more than a decade ago, when Max was a graduate student in literature and Margaret was working as a freelance photographer. They were both Mormon at the time; after briefly dating (“We went steady, we made snow angels,” Max says of their chaste outings), they came out to each other and left the church.
What was the end of a heterosexual romance marked the beginning of a much more interesting partnership. The two moved to Brooklyn, where they live and work together, running a photography and film studio. They both have romantic relationships, but their friendship is the fundamental, organizing fact of their lives. Their life together doesn’t conform to any of the usual shapes for long-term relationships; instead, it’s an act of constant, resilient creativity.
As they began to research her life and work, Margaret and Max became fascinated by the collaborative nature of Cahun’s approach to both art and life. Born in 1894 as Lucy Schwob, Cahun met her lifelong partner, Suzanne Malherbe, when the two were young women living in Nantes. In 1917, when they were in their twenties, Cahun and Malherbe—who would later take the name Marcel Moore—became stepsisters after Cahun’s divorced father married Malherbe’s widowed mother.
“But women in surrealist work don’t seem to have much autonomy,” he went on. “Cahun’s images participate in the same kind of logic that a lot of the surrealists are working with. But she’s gender bending in a way that’s not merely drag—‘I am a woman in male clothing’—but that confuses and blurs gender lines altogether.”
Cahun’s most famous images are inventive, carefully staged self-portraits. In many of them, Cahun embodies heavily charged cultural or mythological figures—a bodybuilder, a witch, an angel, a devil. “She threw together her own outfits, she used whatever she had,” Margaret says. “There’s nothing professional or glossy about the images in any way.” In their film, Max and Margaret recreate several of these images, with Margaret—who bears an uncanny resemblance to Cahun—taking the central role.
In Max and Margaret’s film, this collaborator figure is portrayed by the model and artist Casey Legler, the first woman to sign as a male Ford model. In a dramatic sequence, Legler is shot from above as she wrestles huge, cut up images of Margaret into a collage. These images dramatize “the process of working in collaboration, which is both constructive and antagonistic,” Margaret says. They also embody “the anxiety of influence, of tackling the work of an artist you admire and reinterpreting it.”
The premiere of “Zoetrope” will take place at 8:00pm on Thursday, October 22nd at New York City’s Merkin Hall. Tickets can be purchased online or at the door.
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