Agatha by Beatrice Gibson

UK (2012) - Tiger Shorts Competition

Agatha is a short film by Beatrice Gibson based on a recollection of a dream by British composer Cornelius Cardew. It tells a story about a person who goes to another planet and gets seduced by the alien creature from the title. One could describe it as a gender-bending science fiction film or pulp erotica, but it is also a clever play with the codes and signs of cinematic storytelling.

Beautiful landscapes of the Snowdonia mountains, as well as actors who appear on screen, only loosely embody the elements of the story (characters and places) narrated in the voice-over. Also this voice over is stripped down of its referential quality when the protagonist/narrator with a gentle, female voice informs us that his/her gender will remain unspecified. This alien society doesn’t exist within the binary oppositions we often find in our culture, so the gender differences between people are much more subtle, and possibly exceed the two we find on Earth.

Sexual attraction between the alien species is not only the driving force of the plot, but also a structural principle of the way that cinematic elements stand in a dialectic relation: they don’t mimic each other, but play with each other’s codes and meanings. It is as if Beatrice Gibson loosened up the ties between the sound, image and the content of the story, leaving them to float in the diegetic universe, less straightforward and less fixed, thus proving that even when it deals with figurative imagery, cinema is the perfect medium to describe the places that exist beyond words.

By Mario Kozina