The Season of the Witch
Detail: Margaret Haines, Still, On Air: Purity, Corruption & Pollution, 2024
Courtesy of the artist

10/28/2024

6 min reading time

Writer:
Daniel Urban
Margaret Haines
Video Art
Exhibition
Feminism
Contemporary Art

In our next Double Feature, artist Margaret Haines will present her video work “On Air: Purity, Corruption & Pollution” (2024). Drawing on the life of Joan of OrlĂ©ans (Jeanne d’Arc) and the ideas of occultist Cameron, Haines’ speculative sci-fi film centers on the notion of a female Messiah.

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Paris, 2047. The young Charlot (Jette Loona Hermanis) enters a sparsely furnished room, in her hand a large sword and a throwing knife. Directly on the floor in front of her lies Boris (Joseph Wood) on a mattress watching her with expres­sion­less eyes. A little later his blood will spread out across the room and soak his clothes.

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Margaret Haines, On Air: Purity, Corruption & Pollution, 2024, Film still
© the artist

As in the great sagas in human history, in Margaret Haines’ film “On Air: Purity, Corrup­tion & Pollu­tion” (2024) the act of violence fulfills a prophesy. Boris, or so we learned from the female narrator off-screen, is Charlot’s myth­ical twin brother from whom she was sepa­rated imme­di­ately after her birth. The two grew up with different parents, and without their having any knowl­edge of each other their biogra­phies devel­oped in diamet­ri­cally opposing direc­tions. While Charlot knew nothing of the prophesy that her adop­tive mother once heard about her, she unknow­ingly and despite many detours embarks down her predes­tined path.

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Between (eco)feminism, occultism, and prophesies

Campaign against nuclear power, somber villain, bands of human traf­fickers, (eco)femi­nism, occultism, witch burn­ings, proph­e­sies, tran­shu­manism, and biohacking: Margaret Haines’ latest video forges a sci-fi meta-cosmos replete with asso­ci­a­tions and powerful images and sounds. The film is profoundly influ­enced by Haines’ strong interest over the last decade in Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel, often simply known as Cameron. The illus­trious artist, poet, actress and occultist is today prob­ably remem­bered, if at all, only by a few and then as the protag­o­nist in Kenneth Anger’s “Inau­gu­ra­tion of the Plea­sure Dome”. Until his death, she was married to rocket propul­sion expert Jack Parsons, himself an ardent follower of the occult teach­ings of Aleister Crowley, she herself delved deep into occultism and esoteri­cism. The themes of sexual magic and myth­ical proph­e­sies typical of these move­ments recur in her artistic work, although her oeuvre never received great atten­tion during her life­time and was first redis­cov­ered in the last ten years or so. (An exhi­bi­tion of the works of Wallace Berman at Ferus Gallery included one of her works that was deemed to be lewd, and the show was raided by the L.A: Vice Squad and Berman was arrested.)

Margaret Haines, On Air: Purity, Corruption & Pollution, 2024, Film still
© the artist
Margaret Haines, On Air: Purity, Corruption & Pollution, 2024, Film still
© the artist
Hussein Miloudi, Wandmalerei, Asilah, Marokko. 1978, wie veröffentlicht in Asilah: Premier moussem culturel, juillet/aout 1978, Ausstellungskat.

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When in 2009 Haines came across Cameron in Kenneth Anger’s afore-mentioned film a whole new world opened up to her: “I’m offered a window into [
] ‘The Women Who Were Left in the Shadows’,” she wrote in an essay for her book “Love With Stranger X Coco”, in which she explored different tropes of female iden­tity. In “On Air: Purity, Corrup­tion & Pollu­tion” there are also refer­ences to French resis­tance fighter Jeanne d’Arc, whom the Catholic Church judged a heretic and condemned to death by burning at the stake, but who today is revered in France as a virgin and saint. In the form of spec­u­la­tive fiction, in her film Haines thus creates an asso­cia­tive focus on those women who were sentenced to obscu­rity in a world deter­mined by the patri­archy. At the same time, the mytho­log­ical allu­sions in the piece can be read as an attempt to write an alter­na­tive femi­nist histo­ri­og­raphy.

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“I’m offe­red a window into [
] The Women Who Were Left in the Shadows”

Margaret Haines

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc”

At the end of her film, Margaret Haines explic­itly refers to the short life of Jeanne d’Arc; by contrast, in 1928 in his film “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc” Carl Theodor Dreyer exhaus­tively explored the story of her suffering. In the context of the Hundred Years War between France and England, the young woman deci­sively influ­enced the course of the conflict after initially convincing the French Dauphin of the vision sent to her by God of France’s fate and then also being successful in the mili­tary campaign, for example by driving the English out of OrlĂ©ans. Dreyer’s silent movie concen­trates, however, completely on the trial by inqui­si­tion that the Bishop of Beau­vais brought against Jeanne d’Arc (RenĂ©e Falconetti). Dreyer wrote the script after spending a year researching her life and it is based on the orig­inal tran­scripts of the trial, which involved her being inter­ro­gated 29 times.

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Carl Theodor Dreyers „La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc“

The film is consid­ered a mile­stone of film history and remains impres­sive to this day thanks to its exquisite camera work and RenĂ©e Falconetti’s marvelous acting – entire worlds seem to take place in her face. Visu­ally and in terms of the dramatics and staging, Dreyer links the passion of Jeanne D’Arc with that of Jesus Christ, whereby the English soldiers and the cler­gymen are iden­ti­fied as the tormen­tors. Not least prob­ably for this reason, on its release the film was forbidden in England, while at the insis­tence of the French arch­bishop the film produced in France had repeat­edly to be re-edited by Dreyer’s produc­tion company. “Nowhere is paradise”, Charlot 2047 announces in Margaret Haines’ “On Air: Purity, Corrup­tion & Pollu­tion”, spot­lighting the “exclu­sion of women from sacred”. This can be seen to this day: Jeanne D’Arc was made a saint in 1920, almost 500 years after her murder.

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Double Feature

Discover more exciting video art in the program of the SCHIRN

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