Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry By Lillian Crawford

In Wallace Stevens’s poem ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, he plays on the imagery of what a blackbird can be. The first canto: “Among twenty snowy mountains, / The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird.” As shopkeeper Etero (Eka Chavleishvili) wanders along the edge of a ravine near her remote Georgian village, she too appears to be the only moving thing until she spies a blackbird in a blackberry bush. The title of Elene Naveriani’s film is Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, a concatenation of poetic images which move from the ominous to the succulent. 

When Etero appears on screen, we know nothing about her. We are faced with our prejudices and assumptions when looking at middle-aged womanhood, formed not least by portrayals of older women in cinema. Think of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining or Ti West’s X—she, and her sexuality, are to be feared, the object of our repulsion. Naveriani sees how bodily shame has been internalised by women, and subverts it—Etero is at the centre of her film, her being presented in as many ways or more of looking at a blackbird. Stevens’s seventh canto: “O thin men of Haddam, / Why do you imagine golden birds? / Do you not see how the blackbird / Walks around the feet / Of the women about you?”

Etero is not passing the ravine on the hunt for blackbirds, but blackberries. She is about to take a bite of a particularly ripe fruit when she sees the blackbird, pauses, and then as she goes to put it in her mouth again, the ground gives way and she tumbles down the cliff. In Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Blackberrying’, she writes, “A last hook brings me / To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock / That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space / Of white and pewter lights”. As Etero walks home, she pictures her body in the mud at the bottom of the ravine being turned over by neighbours, dead. Like the fig tree in Plath’s The Bell Jar, Etero sees multiple futures before her. 

The blackberry is the final berry to ripen in the summer. Its bittersweetness heralds the going of the sun and the shortening of days, the last rise before the Fall. Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Blackberry-Picking’ begins: “Late August, given heavy rain and sun / For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.” Etero has abstained from sex all her 48-year life. In a tongue-in-cheek twist on a classic porno set-up, she allows her thirst to at last be quenched by her delivery driver, Murman (Temiko Chichinadze), on the floor of her storecupboard. When the blackberries eventually arrive, we tear at the plump fruit with teeth, “Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for / Picking.” Despite the marks of time on her face and body, Etero’s sense of sensual self is fresh and raw. 

At the end of the poem Heaney’s imagery grows sour. After hoarding the blackberries, they soon begin to rot: “Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.” Etero seems brighter, more radiant. Of the blackbird she says, “It woke me up. Made me feel alive.” But there is a sense that this is a transient thing, a beauty that has come too late and will not last forever. A man cruelly asks if she has become a “whore”, cutting to Etero in a dingy bathroom removing her underwear and using a sponge to wash herself: ‘a whore’s bath’. It is reminiscent of similar washes taken by Jeanne Dielman in Chantal Akerman’s film, another feminist framing of a single woman who harnesses her sexuality. Like Jeanne, Etero is frequently framed by Naveriani in a melancholic green light, casting a sense of unease over her life’s change of course. Despite not being yet 50, Etero fears her life is nearing its end: the hot flashes she experiences which her friends ascribe to menopause trigger an anxiety that she has the same disease that killed her mother.

There is injustice to the latency of Etero’s blossoming, the sting of the blackberry when it finally darkens on the bush. It is not as simple as viewing Etero as the blackberry and Murman as her blackbird—Stevens’s fourth canto: “A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one.” That second “blackbird” in the title blurs the lines between the images of the symbols, calling to mind the lyrics of the Lenon-McCartney song: “Blackbird singing in the dead of night / Take these broken wings and learn to fly”. Etero has been waiting all her life for this moment to arise, but her liberty comes with a sharp aftertaste. But at least before the end, she can say that she lived.

Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry is out in cinemas from 3 May across the UK, courtesy of New Wave Films.

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Constructing a hymen

Written response by Isra Al Kassi

A look at the tell-tale cinematic signs of feigning a virginity in Elaha

If American teenage films are anything to go after the “losing of” or “ridding of” or are actively sought out by men while women are more mindful of the preservation of what’s deemed as both their innocence and their value. 

Milena Aboyan debut feature film Elaha’s original synopsis reads: Elaha, 22, believes she must restore her supposed innocence before she weds. A surgeon could reconstruct her hymen but she cannot afford such an operation. She asks herself: why does she have to be a virgin anyway, and for whom?

In this context virginity takes on the word ‘innocence’ - instantly negated by the ‘supposed’. As an audience we are told that virginity isn’t where the film or filmmaker places the value, but that the pressures in the community feature is something so real it affects the protagonist. We are to understand it as a value placed by someone else; if being a virgin is to be innocent then to get rid of that innocence is to be damaged, impure and devalued. 

The experience of ‘the first time’ in cinema aims to set the tone for the rest of the character’s journey. Whether it be everything they dreamt of, or a horrendous experience. From the coercive like Cruel Intentions (Roger Kumble, 1999) to the pact making à la American Pie (Paul Weitz, 1999). 

As I continue to trip on the words to use, left with phrases like ‘popping cherry’, and ‘losing’ or ‘taking’ we’re already engaging in a futile discussion on ownership and conquest. Where are the terms for pleasure, self-expression, love, and exploration for women? What language and words do we have for virginity or a first sexual encounter?

Constructing a virginity in cinema is a reflection of the misconceptions and ignorance of real life. Equal parts sacred, and saved for preserving and simultaneously not for the choice of giving or losing to be up to the woman herself. What does it say about the high value we claim a woman’s virginity holds if it can crumble so quickly and easily? 

As a society we seem to revel in the ‘is she or isn’t she?’ - it wasn’t that long ago (1981) that Princess Diana had to prove her virginity or the marriage to the then Prince, now King Charles. Her marriage to the future king depended on her virginity. There is nothing to say that Diana was inspected, but her word and her uncle’s public announcement confirming that she was a virgin were enough to seal the deal.

Other ways of telling are if someone has been married before, if they’ve had children or if they’ve been in long-term relationships. In Sex & The City (The Ick Factor, Season 6, Episode 14, 2014) when Miranda refuses a white wedding dress and asks for ‘nothing that says virgin’ for her nuptials she says: ‘I have a child; the jig is up.’ Of course cinema is the perfect place to look at the signs; and the aesthetic ques to go along with them. 

Elaha’s secret is that she is not a virgin. We as an audience only know this from her desperate quest to reconstruct her virginity before her wedding to Nasim a mere weeks away. We know nothing of with who, or when, or the new favourite way to measure a woman’s purity: how many. 

We never know Elaha as a virgin, this secrecy denies Elaha and audience of viewing sex as a rite of passage. This is not a teenage movie, nor is it a slapstick comedy about people in their 40s who ‘missed the boat’ and must now play catch up. This is a film about honouring one’s culture, loving one’s family and respecting one’s custom while also attempting to figure out what she wants and if she also places the same value on her virginity as those around her. 

Writer Kim Hudson developed an entire method called The Virgin’s Promise for screenwriting which aimed to subvert the hero’s journey by focusing on ‘Feminine Creative, Spiritual, and Sexual Awakening’ - the word ‘Virgin’ here relates not to a woman’s sexual experience but of domesticity as her starting point before embarking on her journey. In a way this applies to Elaha.  

While there is an emphasis on the Kurdish culture which Elaha comes from and is deeply embedded in in every facet of her life. The two outlets for her non-kurdish life is her course, one where her teacher tries to get involved in her personal life as a saviour of sorts. The second outlet is a male German peer who dropped out of the course but who Elaha is drawn to, exploring a different side of her domesticity within the walls of his flat and on walks with his dog. 

Writer and director Aboyan credits VirginiaCare (blood capsules to be inserted before penetration to mimic the breaking of a hymen) and hymen reconstructive surgery as inspiration behind the story and says: It is my opinion that for as long as these patriarchal structures do not change, the women affected have no other choice than to have their “virginity” reconstructed. 

The concept of virginity in film is about a before and an after, and the idea that the significance of the first time is the same across the board, for all women. On the most basic level after sex there’s nothing but pain, shame and blood. The act, and preservation is then reduced to this elusive hymen; one which may tear when cycling, doing sports, using a tampon or during intercourse. This is how the physical elements of sexual intercourse run the risk of being led by fables.

Elaha engages in the same tropes which she starts to resent. Placing value on bleeding on her wedding night and going to great lengths to restore her hymen, or to at least fake its tear.

In cinema the stages of losing one’s virginity are split into the planning, the act and the aftermath. 

Unfortunately in some cases, like in Elaha: the aftermath involves fear, and a painful surgery to cover her tracks and transgression. 

In Real Women Have Curves ( Patricia Cardoso, 2002) after Ana (America Ferrera) loses her virginity, her mother Carmen (Lupe Ontiveros) somehow knows that her daughter is no longer a virgin. This is either due to being incredibly insightful and that there were clear signs; maybe her daughter started to emit a glow which was closely linked to a new womanhood; or the mother is just paranoid. 

The question isn’t so much about whether Elaha will get away with it on her wedding night, but if it’s even possible to consider so many people, carry all of that responsibility, and stay true to herself, her wishes and sexuality.

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Isra Al Kassi (she/her) has a background in events management and community spaces and cinemas. She is the co-founder of  T A P E Collective and has curated for London Short Film Festival, BFI Southbank and Aesthetica Short Film Festival. Isra has more recently worked with BIFA, Inclusive Cinema, Independent Film Trust and London Film Festival, Habibi Collective and Shasha with a focus on audience development and outreach. 

#ReclaimTheFrame with ELAHA in a cinema near you.

There Is Only Movement – On Ratcatcher and the Cinema of Lynne Ramsay

Written response by Rafa Sales Ross

Children have a slippery grip on reality and an even slipperier grip on memory. What a cruel thing, then, that childhood recollections are the invisible hands moulding the sensitive clay on the kiln of adulthood, shaping a coming of age that makes or breaks the person that will come. 

Cruel, too, are the muddy waters that envelop the body of young Ryan Quinn, blocking air from pumping through his small lungs. His body is buried in a tiny coffin while mourners battle both tears and the putrid stink of accumulated garbage. It is 1975 and the bin collectors have gone on strike, causing the streets of Glasgow to turn into a sprawling labyrinth of filth and home to the hundreds of rats that name Lynne Ramsay’s 1999 feature debut Ratcatcher. 

It is here, in this very particular time and space, that we meet 12-year-old James Gillespie (William Eadie), a lanky lad whose hands have pushed the meek Quinn boy into the mud. Ramsay chronicles James’s grappling with the trauma of death and the overbearing burden of guilt with a gentle eye, allowing for brief moments of youthful joy to infiltrate the gruelling reality of a working-class Glaswegian family in the 1970s as the slurry runs through the slabbed pavements. 

Much like James, Ramsay was born to a working-class family in late 60s Glasgow. Her childhood would come to inspire all of her work leading to Ratcatcher. Her graduation short, Small Deaths, seesaws through three formative memories of a young girl entering adolescence in a Glasgow housing scheme. Another girl, yet arguably the same Lynne, has her bubble of infantile innocence burst when confronted with the personified truth of her father’s double life in 1998’s Gasman.

Although her following three feature films would all be literary adaptations, Ramsay has yet to step outside of the themes she first explored as a budding filmmaker fresh out of the National Film and Television School. To step into a Lynne Ramsay film is to sign yourself up for a journey through notions of memory, death and childhood within tales beautifully framed by the eye of a filmmaker curious about what lurks underneath the often shallow surface of dialogue.

Ramsay, a photographer and painter before becoming a filmmaker, has a particularly sharp eye for composition and an ingrained understanding of the narrative potential of the frame. A hand holding tightly onto a phone cord, small feet climbing up bus steps, nagging shells plucked out of scrambled eggs. Such details, coupled with the director’s grasp on the emotional pull of sound, round up characters in a sensorial, extradiegetic manner — it’s a tangible, sensuous cinema to which we can return as a memory. It is cinema as a place. 

Ramsay was only the second Scottish woman to direct a feature film, with Margaret Tait breaking the glass ceiling with Blue Black Permanent in 1992. Tait’s and Ramsay’s feature debuts share many commonalities: on a broader note, both revolve around poetic notions of grief and the intimacy that can be gathered from quiet observation. Narratively, both films tell the story of someone’s childhood being inextricably connected to death. 

Many have labelled Ramsay’s cinema as poetic, commenting on her lulling composition and the breathing space she allows her characters, images, and sounds. This encapsulation of her work allows for yet another parallel with Tait, a poet before a filmmaker, whose many short films were created in tandem with her writing. “Ultimately, there’s only movement. Nothing else,” wrote Tait in her poem “Light,” a passage that could also describe the work of her countrywoman. Be it the frenzied scrubbing of red ink in We Need to Talk About Kevin or a man running through corridors in the haunting grainy security camera sequence of You Were Never Really Here, Ramsay’s expertise in stillness rarely manifests itself as clearly as when she captures movement — the tense quietness that precedes a rush of adrenaline, the paralysing nature of fear, the inability to escape someone or somewhere. 

Tait died the year Ratcatcher came out, a, well, poetic passing of the torch. That her fellow Scot would only be allowed to make three more feature films in the two decades since feels a tragedy, but still, somehow, a step forward, considering that Tait only secured funding for her first and only feature in her 70s while Ramsay was still in her 20s when Ratcatcher made waves at the Cannes Film Festival. The same festival would come to catapult yet another Scottish female director to the hungry eyes of international cinephiles, Edinburgh’s very own Charlotte Wells, whose exquisite Aftersun immediately drew comparisons to Ramsay’s earlier work and the director’s curiosity about how grief can affect childhood recollections. 

This time, however, it feels less like a passing of the torch and more a discernible proof that stories that feel true to Scotland’s social and cultural fabric can break through the still sturdy glass ceiling Ramsay has been fighting against for so long. And rarely has a film spoken so poignantly to that truth as Ratcatcher. 

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Rafa Sales Ross is a Brazilian film journalist, critic and programmer currently living in Scotland. She contributes to Variety, BBC Culture, Sight & Sound among others, and can often be seen writing about Latin American Cinema and explorations of death and desire. 

#ReclaimTheFrame with Park Circus' new stunning 4k restoration of RATCATCHER, in celebration of the film's 25th anniversary, HERE.