Katrien Jacobs fleshes out Maria Beatty.
An interview from geekgirl.com.au

The following text is a prelude to a book I am going to write in collaboration with a famous filmmaker from New York, Maria Beatty. Beatty is the subject, a talented and beautiful young woman whose films and performances demand praise and critical attention. This is not a conventional "foreword" which is written only after the book has been completed. We are both very anxious to know whether we can write this book together and the work is only about to start..

Katrien Jacobs: (earlier draft of the text) "Maria Beatty is a renowned lesbian filmmaker "… Maria Beatty: (upset) "A what filmmaker ?" Katrien Jacobs: (other sample of her text) Beatty's black and white film The Elegant Spanking (1995) nostalgically rewrites a history of day punishment scenes, yet the film also shows how mistress and maid can collaborate delicately in reaching mutual satisfaction and orgasm. The Elegant Spanking was produced by Beatty herself... Maria Beatty: (submissive) " What about Goddess Rosemary ?"

MARIA BEATTY AND MISTRESS CARRIE

MARIA BEATTY ABOUT THE ELEGANT SPANKING ...

Maria Beatty: I decided to ask John Zorn to compose the soundtrack for The Elegant Spanking because cinema has always been a central element in Zorn's life and work. The most important thing for Zorn is doing a soundtrack work is creative freedom. His musical composition for The Elegant Spanking was based on trust and his personal interest in S/M and the perverse. It was a natural bonding and understanding of perversion and instinctively we were on the same wavelength. I never doubted Zorn's creative decisions and gave him the freedom to compose directly to the sequence of images. I suggested a more classical, romantic, and subtle approach to the track with harp/cello/viola/percussion but I never interfered or supervised the composition. It was based on trust. I was VERY pleased with the final soundtrack by Zorn but unfortunately my collaborator/mistress (at the time)/and co-star Goddess Rosemary was opposed to Zorn's style and composition. Rosemary created her own soundtrack that included solo piano (similar to piano performed live to silent b&w film -- ala silent film era). I felt her soundtrack was unsophisticated and dominated the images -- rather than complimenting and supporting the flow of the choreography of the piece. I went with Zorn's soundtrack on my final cut, and Rosemary went with her piano creation. This type of decision making was not uncommon during our relationship and creative collaborations together. It was either her way or no way. If I fought for my way then I was no longer considered a sweet submissive slave but rather a controlling from the top masochist.

The "Golden Shower" scene in THE ELEGANT SPANKING was never scripted or planned prior to the shoot. It happened naturally and spontaneously during the filming of various daily erotic fetishistic rituals performed between two lovers. I'm very happy that we included this sequence in the film because it represents a ritualistic and romantic form of intimate lovemaking and an exchanging of vows of love and obedience.

EARLY BEGINNINGS. NOVEMBER 1993

Katrien Jacobs: This is how it all started. When I first met Maria Beatty in New York , she was busy doing some mechanical work in a video archive and we started to talk about her work as a filmmaker and her media collaborations with famous performance artists such as Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle. She was a frail lady with permed blondish hair and she cycled her errands, literally, through the rowdy streets of New York City. Little did I know of the transformations that would take place inside this woman and that her personality would come to flower through a series of experiments which made her into a super-masochist and life-time submissive. You know how that goes with women: they lose weight and change their hairstyle.

Then one evening, in her modest studio apartment in the East Village, Beatty, having worked behind the camera for many renowned artists, told me she had become a performance herself :

	Katrien Jacobs: "Woow! What kind of ?" Maria Beatty: "Well, I met this amazing woman Goddess Rosemary who lives in a house with two slaves?" Katrien Jacobs(ignorant): "What kind of performance art do they do ?" Maria Beatty: " She has both of them chained around the neck. They stay in her house all day" Katrien Jacobs: (shocked)... Maria Beatty: Are you okay ?
MARIA BEATTY AND THE BLACK MASK

MONTHS LATER, JANUARY 1994

Katrien Jacobs (on the phone): Hello Maria ? Yes, everything is okay. You know, I would like to invite you to come to our university to show your videos and ...

Maria Beatty: I want Rosemary to come along.

Katrien Jacobs: eeuh yes .. and which films do you think you would like to show ?

Maria Beatty: My latest stuff! The Elegant Spanking: Mutual masturbation, lots of spanking, and a golden shower.

Katrien Jacobs(runs the dictionary) : euuh

MARCH 1994

Katrien Jacobs(on the phone): You can show anything you want, Maria, as long as you make some comments during your presentation. Maybe you can make a statement of some kind? Something to show the audience that you actually know what you are doing ?

Maria Beatty: Should we do a session, then ?

Maria came with Rosemary. Their spanking session took place at the University of Maryland in April, 1994. And caused a lot of trouble. Katrien slowly pulled herself out of the severe after-shocks of this event and started to conceptualize the book project.


Perth, Western Australia April 29, 1997

Dear geekgirl:

Thank you very much for showing an interest in our work. I understand that your latest issue will focus on "control" and this concept is of course crucial to Beatty’s s/m role-play and film art . Now that Maria has become a life-time submissive, how can we assume that she can nevertheless be "in control of" her life, her profession, her artwork? Beatty mostly revels in acting out "slave" roles in the company of extremely dominant women (such as Rosemary), how and why can she survive and/or overthrow such self-inflicted masquerade?

Well, if she had been a true female submissive, she would probably have kept her perm and continued to work in the shadow of the New York art world. Instead, Mary became potent with sexual energy and a highly demanded performer in lesbian s/m circles. Even though submissive partners are constantly manipulated by dominatrixes in physically challenging ways, it is often their energy which actually initiates the encounter and sets the contours for a gigantic (sometimes cathartic) libidinal flow.

Maria Beatty: I say the "illusion of being owned" because for me that is in fact what it really is, an illusion. For a while I enjoy losing myself in the sweet surrender of my will to those with a fantasy of power and control, the truth is that, whether I am doing a professional scene with a client or engaging in hot sensuality with the person I'm emotionally involved with, I may be at their command but I am never at their mercy.

THE BRAIN IS THE BIGGEST SEX ORGAN.

Katrien Jacobs: In her book Female Perversions, Louise Kaplan shows that in the past, subjugated, domesticated, locked up women like Emma Bovary fantasized sophisticated strategies to turn their obedience into perversion.

Lesbian s/m could be seen as the consciously materialized "monstrous" version of female revolt, but this is to assume that women are urged through false consciousness to act out and improve their fantasies in relation to the "original" heterosexual act. Many feminists would argue that it is okay for women to worship leather belts, dark secluded spaces and over-the-knee spankings, but they have to try to conceptualize the origins of this kind of behavior and possibly, move beyond it.

Well..euh.. for many individuals, psycho-therapy patients particularly, the origins of those desires can be located through memory, but for others, the origins are unknown.

I want show how Maria Beatty is in control of complex processes of desire, bodily exchange, how she fictionalizes and aesthetizes her sex life in order to reinvent definitions of female sexuality which can be stimulating and negotiable for women. Also, how her films and performances broaden the definition of s/m in that they ask mainstream audiences to identify with sex practices which they might not have been able to "see" before.

(Maria, .."this is really a big compliment")

Maria Beatty: I disovered about four years ago that one could make a film with the same personal and direct intimacy in which a writer writes and a painter paints. I interpret things and relationships through fantasy, a specific visionary quality. Relationships between reality and fantasy have always existed for me, mysterious and inexplicable. The darker side of my sexuality stimulates my imagination and consequently plays an integral part in my films. The most unforgettable memories of my adolescent sexual development are integrated into my erotic films and fantasies. The image of the powerful and strong Maternal image is an ongoing and evolving image/personality highlighted as my counterpart/alterego. This illusion of the maternal figure as a powerful, dark and mysterious being that controls and dominates with the power of persuasion, her body, and her sexuality -- FEMME FATALE.

The power of the illusion that this sex organ in your head creates can make the reality of the experience far more intense and fulfilling. Studies have shown that a relatively larger percent of the s/m community are hypersensual and have a higher degree of intelligence as well as a stronger imagination than that of the general population.

In my films "The Elegant Spanking" "The Black Glove" "Let the punishment fit the child" I create sequences of cinematic suspense by presenting a pursuer and a pursued, the dialectic of seduction and desire. The beautiful object of desire as the pursued. I like being afraid of the unknown: it is a sensuous feeling which gives me intense pleasure. One of the main reasons I choose to work in black and white film, besides romaticizing the story and images, is that I feel safe by what I don't know and at ease in uncertain, half-hidden shadowy situations. Also, the use of shadows in b&w (film noir) creates the illusion of depth- which is mysterious and represents desire - not knowing something and wanting to know more... to seek out the unknown. Black and White creates more tension, suspense, mystery (with more saturated & dense shadows), simplicity, beauty, more space for interpretation, and a more subtler form of reality with chiaroscuro lighting and use of shadows.

If you have any questions or comments E-mail: Katrien Jacobs