Staging of Death by Streetcar
HD video with sound, 12" 46"
A proto music-video-come-archive-film by Rosie Morris, Anneke Kampman and The Florence Lawrence Chorus. Centering on the life of Florence Lawrence, the first ever female silent film star, this work questions what it means to be a woman performing voiceless in this context. Known for her nuanced use of gesture and a method of acting called ‘versimilitude’ (derived from the latin ‘same-as-truth’) our interest lies in how this naive bodily ‘truthfulness’ was exploited by the production company that hired her, would not release her name publicly and even faked her death in order to turnover a profit. Using voice, choreography and text we draw parallels between events that occurred in Florence’s own life and those of her fictional persona.