Trixi (1971).
“When I first saw Steve’s films, I actually very often had to leave the cinema,” Laura Mulvey once recalled. Dwoskin’s shorts and early features, shown in alternative venues around London in the late 1960s and early ’70s, tended to show a woman alone in a room, often naked, responding to the camera, sometimes seducing it: Alone (1964), Soliloquy (1964/7), Take Me (1969), Moment (1969), and Girl (1971)... At the time she saw them, Mulvey was working on what became her famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” published in 1975. Having been repelled at first, she began to find that Dwoskin’s films “opened a completely new perspective for me on cinematic voyeurism.” The first draft included a section discussing them, particularly the half-hour Trixi (1971), an “overtly ‘voyeuristic’ film” in which the seduction is consummated. In Mulvey’s words, Dwoskin’s handheld camera facilitated his “intimate involvement as an equal participant in the erotic drama,” breaking down the “distance and detachment that usually defines the voyeuristic position.”
Trixi marked the zenith of the first phase in Dwoskin’s career, after which his perspective began to shift. Born in Brooklyn in 1939, he began making films in the early 1960s among the artists Jonas Mekas had gathered in the Film-Makers’ Co-op. Some of the few photos of this group together—Jack Smith, Ron Rice, Barbara Rubin, Andy Warhol, and more—were taken by Dwoskin, who had gravitated toward the downtown scene from his day job as a graphic designer and teacher at Parsons School of Design. One of his early films, Pot-Boiler, shot in 1962 and now more or less lost, includes footage of a dance rehearsal led by Yvonne Rainer in a studio on St. Marks Place. Dwoskin had been taught to dance as a child, and his style of directing was akin to choreography; he would frequently work with dancers regardless of whether he needed them to dance.
Dwoskin’s surviving New York films belong to the moment of what Mekas called Baudelairean cinema, meaning “a poetry which is at once beautiful and terrible, good and evil, delicate and dirty.” His first films in the “classic” girl-in-a-room mode, beginning with Alone, hinge on a sense of loneliness in their subjects, evoking Baudelaire’s descriptions of “an eternally solitary destiny.” These films share performers with Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Ron Rice’s Chumlum (1964)—namely Zelda Nelson, Beverly Grant, and Joan Adler—as well as an interest in physicality. “I do not know any other filmmaker who is able to get so much dynamic and formal pleasure out of the tones, movements, shapes of the human body,” Mekas once said of him. Dwoskin’s films had barely been shown—one, Two Underground Movie Stars Having Breakfast in Bed (1964), was confiscated by the NYPD—by the time he left New York for London in 1964, and he was left out of the histories of his own scene.
Carolee Schneeman on the set of Times For (1970).
After two years in England, Dwoskin helped found the London Film-Makers’ Co-op and began to have his New York films screened, featuring new scores by Ron Geesin, well-known for his collaboration with Pink Floyd on Atom Heart Mother. The first film he completed in England, Me Myself and I (1968), in which a man and a woman spend a long night in a bathroom, maintained the New York connection: the woman was Barbara Gladstone, an American dancer who had been in Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth—a Rimbaudian title for a Baudelairean film. Dwoskin’s first long film, Times For (1970), “delicate and dirty” to use Mekas’s phrase, shows one man’s encounters with four women in turn, one of them played by Carolee Schneemann, director of the legendary Fuses (1967), who had made a parallel journey across the Atlantic.
Dwoskin met Beatrice “Trixie” Cordua through her filmmaker brother-in-law Klaus Schönherr while they were visiting London from Frankfurt in 1970. Trixie was a dancer trained in classical ballet, but had embraced avant-garde influences like Merce Cunningham—a couple of years later she appeared naked in a production of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at the Frankfurt Ballet—and Dwoskin was fascinated by dancers. It was her husband Peter, also a filmmaker, who proposed that she and Dwoskin should make a film together; on their first meeting he showed her his photos of Yvonne Rainer. They made Trixi, no “e,” in an empty house, barely knowing each other. Trixie expected him to give direction, but discovered “it was all up to me.”
Dwoskin did not see his films as voyeuristic, but almost on the contrary, as a way of bridging what he called the “barrier between looking at life and experiencing life.” In his view modern loneliness came from people’s tendency to look at others without becoming “involved in” them—a tendency possibly learned from the mass media, including movies. In Trixi he would be a participant “as both person and camera,” obviously calling for a unique commitment from both the performer and himself. The consummation was an act, but both Trixie and Dwoskin say they fell in love during the all-night shoot, and by the time of the first screening, they had begun a long-distance relationship.
Beatrice "Trixie" Cordua on the set of Trixi (1971). Courtesy of University of Reading Special Collections.
Dwoskin had contracted polio aged nine in 1948 and spent much of his childhood and adolescence in a rehabilitation hospital outside New York City. “Trixie was totally infatuated—which she admits or says to me—with my disability,” Dwoskin told an interviewer many years later. “She used to stare at me like a child, how I did things.” He walked using crutches and calipers, connected to a corset. “Intellectually I understand it,” Dwoskin went on, “but a lot of the staring gave me the feelings of, often, of how [people stared at me] when I first left the hospital…it made me a bit self-conscious. It triggered off feelings that I thought I had gotten rid of.”
The gazer had become the gazed upon, and the seed was sown for Behindert (1974) (meaning “Hindered”), in which Dwoskin appeared on-screen for the first time opposite an actress Trixie had introduced to him (albeit later to her chagrin), Carola Regnier. In Dwoskin’s words, the film tells a simple story “based on various relationships between able-bodied women and me” in which “disability became the excuse for a relationship’s failure.” Dwoskin presents himself unsparingly, showing himself exploiting his disability within the relationship, in one instance to avoid going to a party he doesn’t want to attend. The film’s critical success inevitably saw him positioned as a “disabled filmmaker” ever after, which he resented.
Dwoskin’s move into feature-length films in the 1970s took him out of the co-op avant-garde, but not all the way into the art film market. Behindert was sponsored by the West German broadcaster ZDF—the same channel concurrently backed films by Chantal Akerman and Ulrike Ottinger—but not very lavishly, being shot in Dwoskin’s house in pre-gentrification Notting Hill by a crew of friends and students. Its soundtrack was also unconventional, consisting largely of a drone and loops by the minimalist composer Gavin Bryars, Dwoskin’s housemate and regular collaborator, with minimal dialogue. It was never easy to make films without robust support, and Dwoskin’s second film for ZDF, The Silent Cry (1977)—in which Trixie has a brief scene as a dance teacher—practically disappeared after Dwoskin’s distributor, the collective The Other Cinema, was plunged into crisis.
Stephen Dwoskin on set, circa 1970. Courtesy of University of Reading Special Collections.
By the dawn of the 1980s, Dwoskin was adrift without projects. His physical condition worsened after a bad fall while editing The Silent Cry, and he was contemplating a return to the US. His solution was essentially to take the “party” scene from Behindert and play it for laughs, flagrantly rejecting the purism—aesthetic and political—that had overcome British avant-garde film culture over the preceding decade. This included the self-recursive “structural/materialist” aesthetic associated with the London Film-Makers' Co-op, as well as the Brechtian stance of Dwoskin's friends and peers in and around The Other Cinema. Instead, Outside In (1981), also made for ZDF, would be a comedy about “the able-bodied’s reactions, prejudices, curiosities, and general attitudes towards the physically disabled”: a series of vignettes taken from experience, with a large cast mostly composed of friends, Trixie included. There are two memorable scenes in which able-bodied women try out Dwoskin’s crutches, recalling the “girl-in-a-room” films but now directly involving the man behind the movie camera. In this complicated game, it’s ambiguous what is fetishization, what is identification, and what is projection. Raymond Durgnat called the result “vivid, humorous, and very sensual indeed.”
Dwoskin had admirers—notably in France, where Serge Daney and Louis Skorecki were fans—but never he crossed over from festival-circuit acclaim into more substantial success. This is particularly unjust in the case of Outside In, and there were long stretches of demoralizing inactivity. In a diary entry from 1991, while making a documentary for Channel 4 about the cinematic representation of disability, Face of Our Fear (1992), Dwoskin wrote that he had been asked “if I only make films on disability—[I] can’t explain that no one, no where will support any other type of work from me.”
Trixie watches Trixi, 1994. Courtesy of University of Reading Special Collections.
Dwoskin’s first films had been made without outside funding and his projects for ZDF had minimal oversight, but by the late 1990s, he found himself having to please multiple bureaucracies to get anything done, without much reward. At the turn of the millennium, he withdrew and descended back into the underground, working independently once again. He had already been experimenting with new digital technology, but now embraced it. Recurrent hospital stays, some the result of post-polio syndrome, had reduced his mobility and his ability to hold a video or film camera, so the lighter tech and more convenient editing interfaces suited his new situation. His first film in this new mode, Intoxicated by My Illness (2001), awash with digital superimpositions, returned him to the exploratory “solitary destiny” of his Baudelairean roots.
Trixie’s appearances since Trixi had been fleeting; if beginning a real relationship hadn’t broken the spell, ending it did. In Dwoskin’s autobiographical essay film Trying to Kiss the Moon (1994)—compiled from home movies, abandoned projects, refilmed footage, and other sources—she has a brief scene in Dwoskin’s editing room, sharing the frame with her younger self as Trixi is run through an editing machine. As is typical of the film, the images are meant to do the talking. Trixie was filmed watching Trixi multiple times, and in a section that didn’t make the cut, she calls the film a “man’s idea.” In the 2000s, however, she once again became a regular collaborator, starring in a string of neo-underground films. Some of these were “ghost-in-a-room” films: the fantasies of a man increasingly confined to his home, where all of them were shot. These works culminated in The Sun and the Moon (2007), a version of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale which Raymond Bellour called Dwoskin’s “chef d’œuvre absolu”—his absolute masterpiece.
Helga Wretman in The Sun and the Moon (2008).
Trixie is one of three performers in The Sun and the Moon, but she was also a key contributor behind the camera. Knowing his tastes, Trixie had often found performers for Dwoskin, and cast the film’s Beauty: Helga Wretman, a trained ballet dancer, now an artist and stunt performer, who was born four years after Outside In was shot. Trixie, who describes her as “without fear,” showed her Dwoskin’s films as preparation. Meanwhile, Dwoskin plays the Beast, largely bedridden and hooked up to a breathing machine. He had once written of how mainstream filmmakers exploited images of disabled people to “startle or scare”; now he would make the role his own, often appearing naked and, in his own words, deliberately “abject and monstrous.” Dwoskin credits Trixie with helping to direct Helga—to get her to look—while he filmed, resting the camera on his lap or on the floor. Much of the film was shot by others. The credits name four filmmakers—Véronique Goël, Maggie Jennings, Keja Ho Kramer, and Tatia Shaburishvili—but Helga names a fifth: Trixie. Their first film, in which she was the person-to-be-looked-at and he was the unseen looker, had inspired him to turn the camera on himself. Decades later, having taken control of the camera herself at last, she brought their collaboration to its end.
"Outside In," "Times For," and a double bill of "Trixi" and "The Sun and the Moon" will screen on June 18 and 19 at Metrograph in New York. The theater’s bookstore will also hold a book launch for "DWOSKINO: The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin" at 5 p.m. on the 18th, featuring editors Rachel Garfield and Henry K. Miller and special guest J. Hoberman.