The Muse, The Film 2021, 2021
The Muse from the Wounded Land Series
7:27′
For over a decade I have used sterile gauzes in The Wounded Land’s performances, healing national, historical and personal wounds.
Wounds inscribed in the memory of the landscape, the city, the map and the body.
Such healing acts always took place in a meaningful location, either for its past history or its present story.
“The Muse” takes place in Metzuke Dragot, a mountainous plateau along the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. Geographically, it has a striking ‘wounded’ morphology as it looms over the spectacular cliffs of Wadi Murabbart.
Historically, Jewish fighters from Judea led by Simon Bar Kochba took refuge there, in hidden caves, during the last Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire circa 132-136 CE.
On a personal level, it was in Ein Guedi, a few kilometers away that my daughter Kalia was wounded as a young girl of 9 during a Scouts’ field trip in 2009. For a year her wounds were bandaged with sterile gauzes. A material that I have been using since then in my healing performances.
In the present work, we return together in September 2020 to this primeval landscape bearing many hidden wounds, as mother and daughter, as healer and muse.
A film by Ariane Littman
Script: Ariane Littman & Ora Maimon Pilewski
Editing: Ora Maimon Pilewski
Original music and sound design: Marcello Pilewski
Aerial Photographer: Shabtai Tal
Cinematographer: Ruslan Paul
Still photographer: Avgar Idan
Costume designer: Lera Lemberg
Assistant: Sahar Haba
Make-up: Idit Ayala Alajem
Colorist: Yair Nahshon
Post production Studio: Opus Digital Lab TLV
Produced by Studio 11
Filmed at Metsuke Dragot, Judean Desert, Israel
© Ariane Littman 2021
