AVATARS: THE DOMINATRIX SLEEPS TONIGHT

Taking the avatar of the dominatrix as its starting point, this short film program gathers together various films made – across a 40-year period – by or in collaboration with those who have experience in the leathersex scene. As an avatar of working sex, the figure of the dominatrix is elusive in so far as she uses the theater of the scene of “violation” to both pursue and obfuscate her desires. Though cinema longs to unmask the dominatrix to witness her “true” self, this program instead finds pleasure in the artifice of the scene wherein various characters find themselves at the mercy of the seductive and controlling gaze of the dominatrix. The shorts here range from documentary exercises of sadism, like Ione Wang’s WHEN I LOOK AT YOU, I SEE ME, to the electric pop-music video work of Beth B’s THE DOMINATRIX SLEEPS TONIGHT, made for the band Dominatrix. Shorts by Azian Nurudin and Michelle Handelman from the late 1980s and early 1990s invite a reconsideration of race, power, and aesthetics through their respectively overlooked and censored films, while M.M. Serra and Maria Beatty’s work demonstrates the aesthetic bliss that emerges from submitting to the fantasies of a powerful woman.

Azian Nurudin NANCY’S NIGHTMARE (1988, 5 min, digital) Michelle Handelman CATSCAN (1989, 6 min, Super-8mm-to-digital. Made with with Monte Cazazza.) M.M. Serra & Jennifer Reeves DARLING INTERNATIONAL (1999, 22 min, 16mm-to-digital) Maria Beatty THE BLACK GLOVE (1996, 30 min, digital) Beth B THE DOMINATRIX SLEEPS TONIGHT (1984, 4 min, video) Ione Wang WHEN I LOOK AT YOU, I SEE ME (2024, 7 min, digital)

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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