Self-Contained (2004).mkv

Iraqi-born, Chicago-based filmmaker Usama Alshaibi has collected ten of his short films made between 2001 and 2008 for Solar Anus Cinema. This DVD shines a light on the transgressive director’s interest in the female form primarily through a series of highly stylized film portraits of women.

Nine out of the ten films included are short profiles of women that run just a few minutes long. The tenth film, the longer running narrative The Amateurs, I’ll deal with below. But, with the portraits, sometimes the object of them is Alshaibi’s wife, performance artist Kristie Alshaibi, but mostly he has convinced other women to pose, strut or writhe in front of his camera’s leering gaze.

The antecedent to Alshaibi’s transgressive work here is Richard Kern’s 1993 My Nightmare, an autobiographical fiction that has the director fantasizing about getting it on with a sexy nude photography model while in “real” life the model is repulsed by his come ons.

For his own female portraits, Alshaibi rarely inserts himself into the action, but his presence is always strongly felt in each piece. While the women are typically posed alone in a studio, Alshaibi’s moving camera constantly reminds us that his subjects are never by themselves, that they are sharing their space with a director who runs his camera over their bodies, soaking in the whole of them as well as their individual parts. Sometimes it’s by an aggressive camera that races and moves in, out and around its nude or barely-clad subject, other times it’s a static camera locked on a tripod that still achieves the same effect through cutting between close-ups, medium shots and full body shots.

Also, whereas Kern explored his physical fantasies in My Nightmare, Alshaibi’s own realized fantasies are purely what we get: Visual. Alshaibi seems genuinely fascinated just by the mere bodily existence of these women. With the exception of his own wife, the women are purely objectified. They are objects to be viewed and admired and there is no tension that Alshaibi wants to touch any of them. His camera’s piercing gaze is all the penetration he needs.

Alshaibi does transform his gaze into physicality with each portrait’s oblique and direct references to violence. Yet, this violence, although outwardly reflected on the women’s bodies, are acts of self-flagellation. Alshaibi is punishing his own guilty consciousness over his voyeurism by transforming the women from sexually seductive beings into physical forms made up of flesh and blood. Alshaibi reminds himself, and the viewer, that the women are not objects, but subjects.

Before running through the film portraits individually below, I’d like to discuss the centerpiece of the collection that concludes the disc, The Amateurs. Alshaibi explores these same ideas in a longer narrative that casts himself as an amateur pornographer with unruly subjects. The “violence” here though is on an emotional, psychological level as the aspiring porn actors try to negotiate their way through their scenes.

Alshaibi’s alter ego in The Amateurs is much more aggressive than what we believe the real Ashaibi, the one who directs the film portraits, to be. For the most part, he keeps himself removed from the on-screen “action.” He remains mostly behind the camera cajoling his two male cohorts to do terrible things to the women who have arrived for the shoot. The film is a comedy with the humor arising both from Alshaibi’s ridiculously bold requests and the males’ reluctance to do what he asks even when the women seem agreeable, sometimes too agreeable.

It’s an interesting turning of the tables on the sexes. The men are humiliated when they act sensitive towards the women. Both the female subjects and Alshaibi the director directly insult and humiliate them. But when push comes to shove and Alshaibi is forced to take the reigns, even he is unable to consummate the acts he desires to watch.

While much of The Amateurs is extremely funny, two scenes are unbearably tense. The first comes from knowing a little bit about Alshaibi outside of the Solar Anus Cinema disc. It’s not identified beforehand, but one of the women in the film is Alshaibi’s real-life wife, Kristie. The closest to sexual touching — and I want to point out I’m not referring to anything explicit here — comes when Alshaibi touches Kristie in ways to show the men what he wants done to her. During these scenes one starts to wonder how far Alshaibi is going to go with this charade.

The film then concludes with it’s most tense situation yet. The Amateurs, although knowing it’s fiction, has a very strong, realistic documentary feel to it and by doing things like casting his real wife, one starts to wonder how much fiction and documentary are influencing each other. The final scenario involves a girl who doesn’t speak English and her drunk, unconscious boyfriend. The violence is ratcheted up to an almost unbearable level when one just doesn’t know how much is acting and how much is real. Does the actress speak English or no? Is that guy really drunk or is he exceptionally convincing? Setting up these tense sequences is when Alshaibi shows off his greatest skill as a transgressive filmmaker.