Synopsis
A symbolic reflection on issues of female sexuality, art and identity constructs.
Asparagus
1979 Directed by Suzan Pitt
Genre
Releases by Date
Theatrical limited
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USA
Releases by Country
USA
17 Mar 1979
- Theatrical limited Ann Arbor Film Festival
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My grandmother loved Asparagus. I could never quite understand why at the time. In fact, she was the only person I knew who didn't actively dislike the stuff.
After having seen this, maybe there was more to it than I realised. Maybe she had kinks I don't even want to imagine. Maybe she was a real dirty old bird.
She would have been rolling around on the floor laughing if she had seen this film. I used to love it when she would collapse into fits of side-splitting laughter when confronted with the ribald and the absurd.
I miss her so much.
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My take: The protagonist (maybe every woman, maybe the filmmaker herself) stays in her home, wrapped up in whatever strange comforts she can find there. Her imagination runs riot. Outside is a world of the crassest, most phallocentric sexuality. Instead of facing it directly, she allows her imagination to reshape it. When she does have to venture forth she guards herself with a mask, hiding her true self. However, by collecting symbols of her experience and sharing them with others she is able to recreate her world. The recreation is ever so slight, but it is enough to allow her to engage, imaginatively, with her sexuality.
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Asparagus is beautifully animated, rich with bright colors and surreal imagery. Indeed, it is considerably more beautiful than most of the other surreal films I have seen. The soundtrack is dissonant and unsettling, and paring it with the images caused a deep effect on me.
52 Films by Women: 34/52
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A woman shits asparagus in this, yet it's still one of the most visually stunning things I've seen
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"I had a garden where I grew Asparagus from seed - it’s a very primitive vegetable going back to the time of the dinosaurs. It comes out of the ground as a phallic stalk, pointy and purple green, the essence of a beautiful masculine form. But then as summer passes it stretches tall and becomes a delicate fern, seen on roadsides tilting in the wind, the essence of the feminine like long strands of tangled hair in the breeze. I thought of it as a beautiful symbol of sexuality. From that I made a visual poem about the creative process, taking the role of the magician/artist as the protagonist who ushers the viewers through her search for the essence of…
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99% of this film is asparagus and flowers, but the poster image chosen is... that. Which is fine; it captures an important moment and theme of the film. But it's funny to me that what is chosen to represent this is not the sexual vegetable imagery.
This should be (and is) heralded as a riot of metaphoric illustrations of sexuality and bodily investigation, but the first major appearance of asparagus on screen irrevocably associates it with a bodily function I find discomfitting and from there I could not stop thinking about it otherwise.
Such is the nature of context inside and out of a film.
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Dubfal-Projekt: Malbücher und andere Kleckereien Film Nr. 2
Der Sitz der Thron,
Das Ergebnis die Ausscheidung,
Das Produkt die Zwei aus dem Einen.Schwimmend in der Partnerschaft,
Zwei gelegter Spargelwürste (Asparagus),
Das Betätigen der Spülung,
Zur Reise des Gewächses.Das Fenster ausgefüllt,
Baumhoher Wüchse,
Die Hand die Bewegung,
Unvollendeten Ergusses.Masken die Verschleierung,
Des dahinter aufragenden Guckloches,
Der Besuch die Menge,
Beiwohnend des Theaters.Töne zum Misston,
Fortlaufend Quietschend,
Das Durchhalten das Fragezeichen,
Eines bunten Farbenrausches.
LSD feat. Farbtopf feat. Spargel – hört sich seltsam an, ist es auch. -
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Frankly, I don’t understand how you could see something like this and feel satisfied with commercial animation ever again.
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Abstract symbolism representing femininity and sexuality meet bold, colorful animation in Suzan Pitt’s Asparagus. The phallic objects, the mask our unnamed protagonist wears, those household items—they all mean something. What do they mean? I’m not exactly sure. Perhaps it’s because I’m not a woman, but one things I am sure about; this short has some of the coolest, trippiest animation I’ve ever seen. It all holds up surprisingly well and makes for a visual delicacy. Subsequent viewings are required to try and decode all of the symbolic material, but I was just enamored with the animation work. I hear this revolutionized independent animated films, so that’s pretty damn cool. Recommended, without question.
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1st Suzan Pitt
Starting with a lady with an absolute dumptruck of an ass defecating the titular vegetable, Asparagus proceeds to be a complicated and ambivalent depiction of female consciousness and individual sexuality. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this exploration is the nods to Laura Mulvey's then-new concepts of the woman as fetishised image in cinema. Her analysis of classical Hollywood and the ways in which women are turned into objects for male pleasure was incredibly important for feminist writers and thinkers, and certainly there are a number of references to this here. The theatre scene, for example, where the woman moves behind the screen to produce a riot of phallic images that confuse and tantalise the audience, can…
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I wanted the film to mirror the way we daydream - as Jung said, "Images are pregnant": each image leading to the next, the mind unfolding, constantly giving birth. I wanted the audience to see the film unfold as if in a daydream. Paced slowly and carefully, each stage and scene fully dense and a bit hyper-illusionistic, the movement going forward without the jar of the "cut." I brought back the "wipe," an early film device to create transitions to keep the action evolving more than changing.
The film is a circle more than a straight-ahead experience - you could enter at any point and the meaning would be the same. The taking in and spewing out, the searching and…