SS: I’ve seen clips of it but not the fully finished version.
Georgina: There are two parts to the film. There’s the beginning section which is called Prelude and that is a 12 minute single take of just my face. Theda Bara was called ‘the woman of a thousand faces’ and I had this idea I would try and film myself with as many different facial gestures as possible without any editing, just one single shot. That ended up taking up a lot of time. I kept thinking it was never good enough, not real enough. I spent weeks trying to perfect each take and in the end I got a 12 minute shot which I was happy with. The second part (Act) is a a series of short scenes which make a kind of narrative, again I was acting straight to camera alone, this was a really important part of my working process.
SS: Did you find it quite strange?
Georgina: The process really made me realise that it was less to do with Theda Bara and her films and more to do with myself and performance. It was actually physically exhausting but also really exciting, because I would often have to force myself to be in the mood to perform every day.
SS: So did you have to force yourself to get up early every day?
Georgina: It varied. For many years I was a total workaholic, up at 5am. I think now it depends on my moods. When I was making Theda I was working every day. I worked mostly nights too because I needed to have total black out (for filming) so I’d prepare during the day and only film when it got dark. It became all about night and day. The texture of the film was supposed to be quite dark and sinister and the night shooting brought something to my performance.
SS: Picasso once said, “One must distrust and destroy one’s own painting and do it over and over. Even when an artist destroys a beautiful creation he doesn’t completely do away with it. How does that relate to sculptures you smashed at your recent opening in Italy (see here)?
Georgina: It’s an interesting quote and I do agree in some respects. I’m comfortable making and deleting. I’m frequently never so happy with anything I do.. But I think Picasso was talking more about a style, of painting or art making and that’s something I don’t really have because each project is always very different, and looks different from the last. The sculptures I made for Italy are not really relevant in this context because they were actually made to be destroyed. The story behind the sculptures comes from a scene in a Theda Bara movie. In many of her films she played the lover or model of an artist. In one particular film, called Forbidden Path, the artist falls in love with her and makes a sculpture of her as “Beauty’. Then during the course of the film her life falls apart and she’s absolutely destroyed. So years later he finds her and makes a sculpture of as ‘Decrepitude’ and she sees the art work and she’s completely devastated and smashes it up. The actual Bara film no longer exists. So the work was inspired by the idea of loss, on many different levels; loss of an artwork, loss of youth and loss of life.
SS: Do you still walk around London listening to horror movie soundtracks?
Georgina: I have to say that I’ve not done this for a while. I started when I first moved here to Hackney Wick. The whole building was empty when I first moved in and I was constantly paranoid and nervous. I’ve always hated horror movies and when I moved in here it was something I believed I had to face. It’s also very beautiful around here on the canals, so I’d walk round listening to the soundtrack of a horror movie (Susperia by Argento was my favourite) and it was amazing, the contrast of the sound and the visuals and the way the sound changed the way I looked at my surroundings. The ‘horror soundtrack listening’ was a precursor to the Bunny Lake series of works I made from 2000-04. I watched a lot Dario Argento as well as other thriller films, which I became completely obsessed with. I love the way Argento makes films, even though there’s outrageous horror, there’s also something else always going on, the camp and the glamour…in that way for me it’s beyond horror.
SS: You think you’ve conquered the fear then?
Georgina: I think I pretty much have. I still avoid certain sorts of horror. It’s not my genre at all. The Bunny Lake works came from somewhere else, somewhere more personal. These works were rooted in my memory of an old thriller film I’d seen as a teenager..
SS: At the end of Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing we discover that the girl’s been in the trunk of the car the whole time and the mother’s sanity is in question. Is that a commentary on society or is it purely revenge?
Georgina: My Bunny Lake works are only inspired by the original film, many of the the ideas for the works came from different sources. The original Preminger film and another film I’d seen as a teenager, Bogdanovich’s Targets were important, but as the works evolved other stories filtered in.