“Strange things happening, mother,” writes Lillian Gish in Night Hunter (2011). She has found a giant egg in her bassinet, an egg that will multiply and lead to her own transformation (into a bird? a snake?). Perhaps her transformation process has already begun and she gave birth to the egg without knowing it.
Strange things happening, indeed.
Over her past three films, Stacey Steers has developed a distinctive style, blending early film performances with 18th and 19th century lithographs to create animations that feel out of time.
Steers’s first foray into this collaged otherworld we’ve come to identify her with is actually her third film: Phantom Canyon (2006). Prior to Phantom Canyon, she worked in a traditional (drawn) animation format using ink and paint, but found she could not adequately express herself in that mode. Those previous two films also featured very different content, exploring Indigenous myth (Watunna, 1989) and endangered species (Totem, 1999).
Phantom Canyon represents a significant shift in both visual style and content. In Phantom Canyon, Night Hunter, and Edge of Alchemy (2017), Steers taps into historical imagery to explore themes of transformation and psychosexual danger.
Many forms of animation lend themselves to transformation, and collage is no different. Even in her earliest films, Steers featured figures morphing into other figures, and the format of collage enables her to extend this interest by combining her human characters with flora or fauna.
The woman and man in Phantom Canyon are models from early film pioneer Edward Muybridge’s 1887 motion studies. Steers gave the man bat wings, and he sometimes transforms fully into a bat and back into a man. He embraces the woman with his bat wings — holding her in — and at one point his wings change into slithering worms. The effect is sinister. As his behavior becomes more aggressive, she mutates into a fish and swims away.
Night Hunter continues this theme with Lillian Gish seeming to face the ennui of domesticity by sliding into another form of existence. The world of the film is truly sur-real, existing somewhere between a woman’s unconscious and quotidian doldrums. Steers resists full legibility, allowing us to draw our own associations as Gish becomes increasingly animal.
Finally, Edge of Alchemy, as the title implies, is a story of supernatural science; alchemy is, of course, all about chemical transformation, but has acquired occult overtones over the years. Mary Pickford plays the scientist, creating a vegetal woman collaged together by Janet Gaynor’s classic performances. Gaynor’s “Frankenstein” has a witchy vibe, made of bees and leaves in addition to being made of woman. I read sexual tension between Pickford and Gaynor and thought Steers staged Pickford’s performance to appear to be longing for Gaynor. But it’s an unrequited desire, as Gaynor swirls into a burst of flowers that scatters to the stars.
In all three of these films, animals and plants are invasive, representing the psychosexual danger the women encounter. Beetles attach the Muybridge Woman in her bed. She stabs at them with giant scissors before being carried off by one. Moths fly into Lillian Gish’s mouth, and the giant eggs proliferate in her home and bleed. Bees fly in and out from under Janet Gaynor’s dress, and leaves thrust up from the floor.
Gish, Pickford, and Gaynor’s personas of white, feminine innocence play against the psychological exploration in Steers’s films. They represent a racist, patriarchal myth we still contend with in Western culture, contributing to the tension we see onscreen. In Night Hunter, Gish feels trapped by her own mythos. In Edge of Alchemy, Pickford and Gaynor play out a counternarrative, cast by Steers in roles they would never have been offered in their own eras.
You can watch three of Stacey Steers’s films — Edge of Alchemy, Night Hunter, and Watunna — at the IU Cinema on February 25 at 7 pm as part of the Underground Film Series.
Laura Ivins loves stop motion, home movies, imperfect films, nature hikes, and Stephen Crane’s poetry. She has a PhD from Indiana University and an MFA from Boston University. In addition to watching and writing about movies, sometimes she also makes them.