‘An Epic Poem’ explores the contradictions inherent in “man’s conception of love” through the myths and representations which support it, and argues that man has constructed love in his own image, reflecting his profound anxieties about prohibited desires. Deftly using poetry, archive material, allusions and re-enactment, it teases out the threads of past and present, love and war to investigate those tensions usually hidden from our view. Central to the film is Rokeby Venus, slashed by militant suffragette Mary Richardson. It becomes an entry to the “historic” past but also to myth and the unconscious, its imagery developed and shifted in a tableaux-like series of encounters between Aphrodite and Ares.

I was searching to understand the contradictions myself and other women confront within our experiences of love. That love, controlled by the proto-types set up through “histories”, polices our emotions, directing our social, economic and sexual status. In order to confront 

love we become confronted by war... To understand our roles in this theatre of Love/War we must employ alternative tactics to reflect our experiences to motivate the emergence of our oppressed desires. 

– Lezli­-An Barrett

The film looks back, not in order to find a lost women's history truer than prevailing male versions, but to provoke contradictions which allow us to question the past and its inevitability. It finds the past again in the present, in a new set of problems and contradictions. 

– Pam Cook, Screen

It weaves together an incredible diversity of material... The interconnec­tions are so strong as to be utterly absorbing. 

– Jo Camino, City Limits

Description source: Circles Catalogue (circa 1983). Compiled by Helen MacKintosh and Margaret Gillan. Edited by Felicity Sparrow.