Film | Pellea[s] (2019): Notions of Gender

In her new film, Josephine Meckseper adapts Maurice Maeterlinck’s ((1862 – 1949) otherworldly play Pelléas et Mélisande (1893) for our current sociopolitical landscape, weaving together fictional scenarios and dramatic footage captured from the last Presidential inauguration, as well as from the landmark women’s march that followed. Conflating contemporary political realities with a timeless love story, the city of Washington D.C. and its architecture become a context and site of departure, giving voice to debates around notions of gender found in the original play.

By underscoring the film with Arnold Schoenberg’s (1874 – 1951) modernist version of Pelléas et Mélisande (1903), Meckseper draws a direct correlation to the way early Modernism and the avant-garde developed into a form of political and aesthetic resistance to neo-classism and capitalism.

A conversation with Meckseper follows the screening.

Josephine Meckseper (b. 1965) is a German-born contemporary commercial artist based in New York City. Her large-scale installations and films have been shown at various international biennials and museums.

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862 – 1949) was a Belgian playwright. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911 "in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers' own feelings and stimulate their imaginations". The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life. His plays form an important part of the Symbolist movement.

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (1874 – 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He was associated with the Expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. With the rise of the Nazi Party, Schoenberg's works were labeled degenerate music, because they were modernist and atonal. He immigrated to the United States in 1934. Schoenberg was also an influential teacher of composition; his students included Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and John Cage among others.