Operating as a mythopoeic reimagining, the film liberates Gradiva from the sacrificial script historically imposed upon the feminine. Drawing on the spirit of Hélène Cixous’s fascination with Wilhelm Jensen’s, Gradiva and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic reading of the novella in Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva, the moving images suspend Gradiva in nonlinear time; between the suggestion of movement and the fixity of stone. As Hanold projects his fantasies onto her, her image becomes detached from her own subjectivity and made to serve his desires. Seen through a feminist theological lens, this idealization evokes traditions that sanctify feminine self-abnegation, transforming feminine submission and emotional labor into virtues through which masculine subjectivity is restored.
About Gradiva
https://www.greeninteger.com/book.cfm?-Wilhelm-Jensen-Gradiva-&BookID=171
“Originally published in 1902, Wilhelm Jensen's novella Gradiva tells the story of a German who falls in love with a Roman statue of a woman. His attraction leads him on a journey to Pompeii that crosses over into a dream, in which he meets the woman, who died in the Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD. But when he speaks to her in Latin, she replies in German. Is she real or a delusion?
In 1907, Sigmund Freud wrote an essay on this question, "Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva," which our edition includes. Gradiva was also popular with the Surrealists.”
super 8 film & digital 4k
7m:43s
filmed with the assistance of Ellyse Egan, Griffin Morse, and the Prelinger Archives
featuring SABINE
original score by Angelo Scott
audio mastering by Christopher Paul Klarer
https://tyronza.bandcamp.com/album/the-incantation-of-gradiva-original-film-score
Screened:
The Portland Darkroom. Portland, Or. 2025
South Sound Experimental Film Festival. Tomorrow Theater / Pam Cut
Portland, Or. 2026