The Mermaid

The Mermaid is a digital collage film with raw material drawn from the Chicago Film Archive collections related to movement, including dance, wrestling, sports, and entertainment. Responding to the centennial of Women’s Suffrage and the MeToo movement, the focus of this film is on women in 20th century America and the limited options available to them. An excerpt from an Adrienne Rich poem provides a narrative thread to the imagery and invites a feminist interpretation of the action. It is a commentary on beauty as agency in a “man’s world,” with the arts and entertainment as areas where women were allowed entry, while at the same time raising the question of female identity and available role models that transcend common gender tropes. The performative element and the spectacle of the female body are the driving force of the film, and form the locus of the women’s strength and power, but are also the source of exploitation, limitation, and compromise. This film was commissioned by the Chicago Film Archive for their 2020 Media Mixer.