SYNOPSIS

The city sleeps as the artist shuffles slowly to the warm red glow of the dingy brothel. Inside, on the top floor, young Odette has her hair combed in preparation for the next sad fool waiting below. The familiar tug of the comb and she's a child again, perched on the lap of her mother, who firmly tugs the tangles out of her coarse, scribbled hair. All stories on earth exist in that hair, her mother would say, and that's why you must comb it, always, so you can be wherever you want to be. She has always believed this, young Odette, and as she plummeted through the misfortune of her short, sorry life to the reality of the brothel, she has combed. And now, as she laments, she climbs onto the window ledge, wondering whether her mother was wrong.

 STATEMENT

In conjunction with Central St Martins, this film was commissioned by the Education department of the National Gallery in London for its Transcriptions series. The painting transcribed was Edgar Degas' La Coiffure.

"I was interested in the contradictive elements of the painting. The action, that of one woman combing out another woman’s hair, is evocative of so many memories of having my own hair combed by my mother, sitting on the floor on a cushion between her legs. It was one of those childhood things that I absolutely hated, but now, as an adult, I look back on with nostalgia, as the act of hair-combing is one that denotes all mothers and daughters. In that way, it is cyclical, and can be a metaphor for the history of shared experience, and the passing on of knowledge, beliefs, ideas, and hope. My mother combed my hair, her mother combed her hair, and I will comb my daughter’s hair.

However, what seemed intriguing about Degas’ painting, was the gaze of the artist himself. The production of La Coiffure and his series of female nudes drew out the bachelor-misogynist in him, far from the innocent Impressionist scenes of ballerinas in shimmering tutus for which he was known. His voyeuristic tendencies and rumour of his ill treatment of his female models determines that, underneath the guise of this intimate scene lurks something far more sordid and sinister. The woman in this painting was, in fact, of a prostitute in a brothel. Coerced, the intimacy and innocence of the pose – the way, like a child, she raises her hand to her head to stop the pain – is contradicted.

In parallel, the rich, warm, boldness of colour is intimate and encompassing, but the artist’s limited palette and the disconnection between the two figures suggests a situational coldness and austerity.

I wanted to speak of this contradiction between intimacy and indifference, make-believe and reality, naivety and a sobering lack of innocence."