Film Review by Andreas Thomas: Every Room Behind A Door

Everything is true, but so is the opposite. – K. Schwitters

The sound is from the movies, the picture is homemade.
Berlin artist Petra Lottje has chosen twenty-five dialogues between couples from throughout movie history, dubbed into German and disconnected from the original film sequence. She sends the visible element of the male figure offstage, leaving only his voice, while she re-renders the female roles, lip-syncing in front of the camera.
25 Petra Lottjes. Or rather, 25 depictions of women in movies, such as: the solitary femme fatale, the women’s libber who wants kids, the sloppy housewife and so on and so forth and da capo. The film is a loop, meaning it has neither beginning nor end. It could keep running till the cows come home and we still wouldn’t understand a thing. Maybe that’s exactly what it’s about: understand- ing nothing and noticing everything.
In her 19-minute film „Every Room Behind a Door“ (orig. „Jedes Zimmer hinter einer Tür“), multimedia artist Petra Lottje tries out 25 leading lady roles, or better said: role fragments out of film fragments, some of them only seconds long.
She puts on the roles as though they were clothes; she has a different costume and make-up for each sequence and plays each one in a different style: calm, passionate, wired, drunk, prude, cold, notorious, strict, playful.
By tearing the feminine half of the dialogue out of the films (most of them Hollywood flicks), Lottje creates funny, disturbing, new and yet familiar connections between film and spectator (some of which aren’t new at all). Besides the film dialogue, there is now also theEvery Room Behind a Door
Everything is true, but so is the opposite. – K. Schwitters
The sound is from the movies, the picture is homemade.
Berlin artist Petra Lottje has chosen twenty-five dialogues between couples from throughout movie history, dubbed into German and disconnected from the original film sequence. She sends the visible element of the male figure offstage, leaving only his voice, while she re-renders the female roles, lip-syncing in front of the camera.
25 Petra Lottjes. Or rather, 25 depictions of women in movies, such as: the solitary femme fatale, the women’s libber who wants kids, the sloppy housewife and so on and so forth and da capo. The film is a loop, meaning it has neither beginning nor end. It could keep running till the cows come home and we still wouldn’t understand a thing. Maybe that’s exactly what it’s about: understand- ing nothing and noticing everything.
In her 19-minute film „Every Room Behind a Door“ (orig. „Jedes Zimmer hinter einer Tür“), multimedia artist Petra Lottje tries out 25 leading lady roles, or better said: role fragments out of film fragments, some of them only seconds long.
She puts on the roles as though they were clothes; she has a different costume and make-up for each sequence and plays each one in a different style: calm, passionate, wired, drunk, prude, cold, notorious, strict, playful.
By tearing the feminine half of the dialogue out of the films (most of them Hollywood flicks), Lottje creates funny, disturbing, new and yet familiar connections between film and spectator (some of which aren’t new at all). Besides the film dialogue, there is now also the dialogue with the audience, which leads to a defamiliari- zation of the material, even for those who feel at home in the world of movies. Although I had heard many of the dialogues before, I could only pinpoint one of them: „Gone with the Wind“.
Gender studies hands-on, one might say. Or gender stud- ies via Hollywood, living room, and your own conscious- ness.
What is truly ingenious is the way Lottje shows us moviegoers what movies actually do to us: they infiltrate our self-image, negate our so-called independence and replace it with the stories of others‘ lives to the point where we can no longer tell if we are women in our own right or just a product of the last 80 years of film.
Focused as it is on film history’s favorite disaster area, Man and Woman, „Every Room Behind a Door“ is decidedly a woman’s film, if there is such a thing. It portrays women and their unsolvable conflicts in a man’s world (after all, there is no such thing as incomprehensible women, only men unable to comprehend them). But at the same time, the film is a visual concept of and for today’s multimedia society, the multitasking, multireceiving woman („I’ve got all my sisters in me“), an example of the dispensabil- ity of authorship and the end of authenticity. A critical look at how fiction has taken over collective memory and personal retrospection. „A completely staged reality“, as Petra Lottje puts it.
© Andreas Thomas 2006

English: Naomi Shamban