True Body

Denmark 2016 (5:14 mins)

Co-directed and produced in Eye & Mind Laboratory for Visual Anthropology (w/ Louise Hollerup and Maya Byriel)

True Body is a sensory ethnographic film that explores the cultural ritual of body hair removal. The film contrasts two audiovisual layers: a staged conversation in a sauna among four Danish women and a performative shaving sequence. The film’s approach plays with the conventions and constructedness of ethnographic film, bodies, and gender.

The topic of female body hair in our society is shrouded in cultural taboo - the presence of body hair is considered unattractive, dirty, and excessive; in its removal, women’s body hair is rendered invisible and discussion of it is silenced. Our cultural aversion to acknowledging female body hair is so evident that even commercials for feminine shaving products show women shaving an already hairless leg. Referencing and subverting the erotic, near-sensorial aesthetics of feminine shaving advertisements, True Body employs strategies of proximity and distance to elicit a multiplicity of affective experiences and extend the viewers’ perception of this everyday practice. As the shaving becomes increasingly coarse and compulsive, the familiar practice becomes suddenly strange and alienating.

The use of haptic audiovisual elements conjure a visceral experience of female bodily otherness and abjection. Within this sensorial intimacy, blood mixes with soap, razors scrape harshly across skin, and the hair takes on its own subjectivity, covering skin and surfaces, clogging the drain, dropping onto the lens - unruly, contaminating, glorious hairy excess - an autoethnographic ritual horror film.