Songs From Naples (Viennale-Trailer 2022)

For her contribution to the Viennale’s 60th anniversary, Argentine experimentalist Narcisa Hirsch has chosen to dip back into history. Her trailer is a reconfigured excerpt from her 1971 film CANCIONES NAPOLITANES. In this short passage, we see a close-up of a woman’s mouth, accompanied by the music of Neapolitan singer Robert Murolo. First we see the woman smile, but then she starts eating something slimy. Hirsch’s trailer is concerned with surfaces in many ways, and the fugitive pleasures they can afford us. Her work has always focused on bodies and tactility, the haptic moments that privilege affect over concept or ideology. Here, we are offered the “skin” of the film, its scratches and pockmarks, but also undulating stripes of paint that play against the film’s representational function.
Meanwhile, the woman onscreen eagerly consumes the fruit-gel, her open-mouthed chewing allowing us to see the grape-colored goo coating her teeth and dripping down her chin. Hirsch has found an ideal combination of luxurious and transgressive sensations, the stress of the filmstrip asserting itself as a woman indulges in pure gustatory delight. A suggestive metaphor for the cinematic experience, Hirsch reminds us that when the lights go down, we are sensual beings above all else. (Michael Sicinski, Viennale Catalogue 2022)