Nov. 3rd – Jennifer Montgomery’s Deliver

Jennifer Montgomery. Deliver. 2008. All images copyright of the artist, courtesy of Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org

November 3rd, 2014
@ Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz (map)
7pm
$10 (BUY TICKETS)

Add to Calendar 11-03-2014 19:00:00 11-03-2014 21:00:00 11 Jennifer Montgomery's DELIVER A parody / remake / reprogramming of John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) with an all-female cast of experimental film and video artists. Full details at https://www.ercatx.org/nov-3rd-jennifer-montgomerys-deliver 320 E 6th St, Austin, TX 78701 Experimental Response Cinema admin@ercatx.org https://www.facebook.com/events/279792818842837/ false MM/DD/YYYY

A parody / remake / reprogramming of John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) with an all-female cast of experimental film and video artists, Jennifer Montgomery’s Deliver (2008) “is much more than a simple gender inversion. Montgomery takes her funny thought experiment to surprising and provocative depths, and Deliver tweaks our understanding of big ideas like gender, violence, birth and nature: an example of independent cinema at its finest.” (Penny Lane). Programmed by Rachel Stuckey.

Deliver by Jennifer Montgomery
98 min / digital / sound / 2008

“Like a generation of viewers, I was profoundly affected by Deliverance. But I have always been troubled by the hegemonic structures of gender proposed by Boorman and Dickey. Hence, my version is played by women: myself, Peggy Ahwesh, Jackie Goss, Su Friedrich, and Meredith Root, all experimental filmmakers who work as academics. While faithful to our respective male characters, we also play ourselves.

Provocative questions arise through these filters of similarity and difference. My film’s title, Deliver, refers to the re-birthing experience of surviving extreme physical challenges, the product-obsessed nature of the film industry, and, of course, the fact that it is only women who can, biologically, truly deliver. Unlike the Deep South setting of Deliverance, Deliver takes place in the Catskill Mountains. The group goes canoeing down a river, which is, believe it or not, called Beaverkill. We are confronted by two local women armed with a shotgun, and one of us is sodomized. This is the moment when a seemingly simple exercise in gender inversion becomes complicated. In the original, the iconic male hillbillies’ hostility toward bourgeois men is based largely on land entitlement. Few women can claim that history of entitlement, and the Catskills are not hillbilly country. Most importantly, there is the false notion that women do not pose a sexual threat to one another. What, then, motivates this rape? At what point do we read it as an unconvincing imitation of a ‘real’ rape? The lines between bathos and pathos become dangerously blurred. It is the aim of this film to pose critical questions about the gendering of nature, homosocial sexual violence, and the act of filmmaking itself.” – Jennifer Montgomery

Deliver (excerpt) from Jennifer Ruth Montgomery on Vimeo.