The Filmballad of MAMADADA tells the story of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, unsung member of the New York Dada movement. A poet, artist, model, and public provocateur, the Baroness defied the social and artistic codes of her time. As with many of her female contemporaries, the Baroness's cultural legacy has been obscured, and in some instances appropriated into the oeuvres of better known male peers. Accounts of her personal life are scarce and often conjectural.
According to recent scholarship, the Baroness was born Else Hildegard Plötz in 1874. At age 18, she ran away from her middle-class Prussian home and survived as a vaudeville performer in Berlin. After a series of bohemian lovers and three failed marriages, she found herself penniless in New York City, a widow with the impressive title of Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven. The Baroness was notorious for wearing outlandish costumes and cross-dressing in public, and her overtly sexual poetry caused such scandal that she was blacklisted from the most avant-garde publications. She pioneered an assemblage aesthetic, making sculptures and clothing from everyday objects. Many believe she gave Marcel Duchamp the porcelain urinal that later became Fountain. An important figurehead for the fledgling Dada movement in America, the Baroness was a close friend of avant-garde luminaries such as Djuna Barnes, Berenice Abbot, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound.
The Baroness died under mysterious circumstances in 1927. In 2012, Lily Benson and Cassandra Guan recruited a group of over fifty artists and filmmakers to produce a collective biopic about her life. Participants were invited to interpret specific biographical fragments and create filmic adaptations on their own terms. The results varied wildly in style and content: from a re-contextualized Jane Fonda interview, to an animation depicting the effects of syphilis, to a reconstruction of a lost 16mm film by Duchamp and Man Ray. Benson and Guan then assembled the vignettes into a feature-length film. Unfolding like an exquisite corpse, the final narrative reveals a gloriously conflicted historical portrait. A myriad of contemporary feminist voices confront the viewer with more questions than answers.
Leslie Allison, Animals, Raoul Anchondo, Mauricio Arango, Doug Ashford, Harold Batista, Gregory Benson, Lily Benson, Caitlin Berrigan, Clara Carter, Lea Cetera, Joanne K. Cheung, Abigail Child, Abigail Collins, Katy Cool, Cecilia Corrigan, Alex DeCarli, EASTER, Chitra Ganesh, Alex Golden, Cassandra Guan, Jorun Jonasson, Prudence Katze, Simone Krug, Joyce Lainé, William Lehman, Alexandra Lerman, Ming Lin, Thomas Love, Rob Lowe, Kirby Mages, Markues, Mores McWreath, Erin Jane Nelson, Anne Marte Overaa, Michala Paludan, Leah Pires, Sunita Prasad, Joanna Quigley, Will Rahilly, Amy Reid, Isaac Richard, Doron Sadja, Saki Sato, Frances Scholz, Dash Shaw, Sydney Shen, Beau Sievers, Shelly Silver, Ursula Sommer, Jim Strong, Aaron Vinton, and James N. Kienitz Wilkins.
Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX)
Official Competition: New Visions
World Premiere
November 14, 2013
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
January 18, 2014
International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)
Netherlands Premiere
January 28, 2014
Lisbon International Independent Film Festival (IndieLisboa)
Portugal Premiere
May 2014
Asterisco International LGBTIQ Film Festival
Argentina Premiere
June 3, 2014
New Horizon International Film Festival
International Competition: Films on Art
Poland Premiere
July 25, 2014
Athens Avant Garde Film Festival
Greece Premiere
12-23 November, 2014
Pink Life Queer Film Festival (Ankara)
Turkey Premiere
15-22nd January, 2015
PRODUCERS
Lily Benson & Cassandra Guan
ASSOCIATE PRODUCERS
Channing Benson & Keenan Patrick Pryor
DIRECTORS
Lily Benson & Cassandra Guan
EDITOR
Cassandra Guan
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Harold Batista
SOUND
Josh Allen
MUSIC
Easter (Max Boss & Stine Omar), Doron Sadja, Cross (Leslie Allison & Lily Benson)
DRAWINGS
Lily Benson
ANIMATION
Lily Benson & Thomas Love
VOICEOVER
Ulrike Müller
VOICEOVER SCRIPT
Lily Benson, Cecilia Corrigan & Cassandra Guan
VOICEOVER RECORDING
Doron Sadja & Ezra Tenenbaum
COPY EDITING
Leslie Allison
CREDITS
Thomas Love
WEBSITE
Dan Taeyoung
This Production is made possible by a grant from NYSCA Electronic Media & Film Finishing Funds.
"Lily Benson and Cassandra Guan orchestrate a playful and chaotic experiment that posits a return to a grand collective narrative via the post-queer populism of YouTube and crowdsourcing" — ARTFORUM
"The Filmballad of Mamadada is something as rare as a work that renews the scandalous ideals of the avantgarde without the slightest trace of retro nostalgia." — CPH:DOX
CONTACT: production@mamadada.info
ABOUT THE DIRECTORS:
Lily Benson is an American film director and visual artist. Her work examines feminist history and reconstructs it into new narrative forms. She received a BFA from The Cooper Union in NYC and is a MFA candidate at Malmö Konsthögskolan in Sweden.
Cassandra Guan is a New York based conceptual artist working within and against the tradition of film. Through narrative experimentation, her work seeks to reclaim culturally repressed histories while engaging critically with the promise and problematic of such representations. Guan was born in Beijing and relocated to the US in 2000. She received a BFA from The Cooper Union and subsequently attended the Whitney Independent Study Program.