Siouxzi L Mernagh

Vita

After graduating from a Bachelor of Visual Media and a Graduate Diploma in Media Arts and Production in Sydney, Siouxzi has worked in both Sydney and London as a film journalist, film curator, director’s assistant and advertising producer and was the coordinator of the 2007 Sydney Underground Film Festival. Siouxzi has also written, directed, produced and designed six self-funded short films and has written and edited scripts for experimental feature films and documentaries. Siouxzi recently completed her fellowship with the Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Through further research and collaboration with the other fellows, Siouxzi completed 18 minute subconscious narrative film 'The Dangers'. Siouxzi is currently entering the film into international film festivals and gallery exhibitions. The film will shortly be screened at Revelation International Film Festival, Australia.

ICI-Project

The Dangers
The Dangers, an 18 minute film, refers to inner tensions of personal, particularly female, identity and the external manifestation of these tensions in the forms of sexual expression and propensity to violence. It expresses this upholding an assumption that time is fluid and malleable. My fascination, which I believe is evident in ‘The Dangers’, focuses on the spiralling tensions between desire and jouissance. It is my aim in the future as a filmmaker to continue to focus on evoking this relationship both within my films themselves and hopefully as an audience reaction to the films. The question could be asked: what are the aesthetics of this relationship? 'The Dangers' achieves the aim of pushing the ideologies of the subconscious narrative film to the extreme. This process was aided by developing its psychological and philosophical possibilities over the course of the Fellowship, bounded by the overarching concept of ‘Tension’. I believe The Dangers, as aimed, has emerged as a new form of narrative film: the subconscious narrative film. I hope now to push this conceptualisation further through the feature I am currently working on, set in Berlin and entitled 'Peep Show'.

Project Goals

Filmmakers such as Luis Bunuel, Maya Deren, Jean Cocteau, Roman Polanski, Ingmar Bergman and David Lynch have achieved explorations of the fluidity of identity via non-conventional filmmaking methods while still retaining a narrative structure, however, I believe ‘The Dangers’ pushes these ideologies to the extreme. The script was based on
a nightmare and created via a stream of consciousness method. The
scripts for my previous film 'Third Eye Open' (2007) was also based on my own dream and created via this method.

Visual and non-visual research (including readings on Zizek, Deleuze, Kristeva, Derrida, Lacan, Freud, Badiou and Bataille) heightened and further informed by filmmaking methods for 'The Dangers', as did interactions with the other ICI fellows.

My goal through the creation of 'The Dangers' was to achieve explorations of the spiralling relationship between desire and jouissance, lack and excess, with a particular focus on female identity and to visualise these explorations via a 'subconscious narrative film'. I also hope to further these explorations through my next film which I am currently writing, entitled 'Peep Show'.

synopsis
The Dangers | 18 mins | HD
'The most dangerous plaything is woman...'
A mysterious hotel. Two inexplicable doppelgängers. A woman in need of danger.
There are many things lurking in corners.
Alice takes Hugo to a party in the penthouse suite.
But they are already there. They have, unknowingly, been visitors before here and in places like this.
There is a lot of blood - and whisperings beyond them.

External Links

For more information about myself as a filmmaker and my past work, please visit:

www.siouxzimernagh.com

To view my previous film, 'Third Eye Open', please visit:

www.divshare.com/download/4144272-199