Maria Beatty
by Claudia Gehrke
(Verlegerin, konkursbuch Verlag, www.konkursbuch.com,
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When I recently interviewed a couple of women for the coming lesbian Eye, we spoke about lust in longer relationships. They explained that they sometimes when they are exhausted, they simply put on a film in order to begin with sex. After all possible other attempts, they always came back to the films of one filmmaker: films by prize winner Maria Beatty. Why? Because these films are truly stimulating.
Maria Beattys films arouse both body and fantasy. "I am a fantasist" said Maria Betty about herself. It's about sex and power of thoughts. The clitoris, for example, is a gorgeous detail of female anatomy, but it cannot be restricted sexuality to anatomy.
Maria Beatty plays with boundaries, including her own. She goes back into the erotic of other times. The poetic vision of the sexual is of interest to her. "I make pornography," she said in an interview held a few years ago. Pornography, in the conventional sense, relates to the body "like a broken record, that skips and keeps playing the same thing." Maria Beatty's films are not "pornography" - but whoever imagines something detachedly abstract, would be false; Maria Beatty's films show physical lust in enormous intensity.
The "interpretation of things" also belongs to the poetic vision. Maria Beatty's films were also tagged as lesbian BDSM-films. And that is correct - women performers, fetishes, lesbian sex and BDSM-techniques. On the other hand it isn't entirely correct. Her films are about more than just sexual identity or sexual techniques and physical lust. They are about sexual staging between body and mind, and about stories in which women come through and from a level between mind and body.
Pain often belongs to the staging. Enduring pain can transport the body to a point at which the mind is sexually connected to the body.
Something that has always led to critical questions in terms of: "is that not violence?" It is not, because the lust of the other becomes more perceptible and visible, who surrenders herself to pain, which is consciously and quietly administered.
The bodies are a means of expression. It is not about words. Bodies and faces speak for themselves. It's about how she moves, what she does with her hands, with her eyes. This poetic language shows itself, for example, in the formation of the bodies through bondage in Silken Sleeves.
This language is not comparable to conventional pornographic language, suggested by the familiar "do me, give it to me, harder, harder!!" Everything that happens is desired by the women, while their faces and bodies often tell a different story.
Slowness, portrayal of pain, surrender and lust are to be seen - and even if not all types of pain don't "bodily" please me, like in the beautiful film 7 Deadly Sins, during which I at times wanted to look away (I am not, for example, into breast clamps; flagellation on the other hand is another matter). These elements express the surrender to pain and lust in an expression of the faces - the bodies always following their desired movements, to reach different levels as the mentioned anatomical. - and that lets me then continue watching and become aroused. Her films are aesthetically thought out works of art.
Both the aesthetic of form and the authenticity of lust are of meaning in Maria Beatty's films. Empty, abstract forms are not seen. It is always about the ecstasy in its concrete appearances, and one never looks to the other side - like "Germany or USA private - just filmed reality.
That's why her films arouse mind and body: because she shows a feminine portrayal of lust, which goes beyond just the physical by intensively approaching borders of bodily lust, the borders between existence and non-existence, mind and body.
Susan Sontag said in her famous essay on pornographic fantasy ("Kunst und Antikunst“, 1968 in German); that sexual fantasy always hearkens back to things that one doesn't experience in reality and doesn't want to experience in reality; that a type of imaginary reservoir exists, from which one scoops. It is not about, to come back to the interviewed couple mentioned at the beginning of the speech, re-enacting that which one sees; rather, that they scoop poetic imaginary intensity from the films.
For this we thank Maria Beatty: that she has expanded these imaginary treasure with her poetic, sexual pictures, from which our fantasies can draw.
