Delilah
With chiaroscuro lighting, lyrical camera movement and an evocative drum-based soundtrack, Syed constructs a world that is dream-like and redolent of desire. There is no voice, no central speaking subject, but instead a fluid shifting back and forth to a number of beautiful, semi-abstract female forms; moving across the filmic space with poise and energy, seemingly absorbed in a kind of narcissistic ritual. Seen in silhouette, often from a low angle, the female figures run, sway and work out, with a physical power that invites fetishistic pleasure – the swing of a white sleeved arm, the languorous toss of a head of black hair, the sheen of light on a leather jacket. Emerging from the shadows, strong, sexual and beautiful. ‘Delilah’ invites the desire of the female spectator for its subject via the seductive mechanisms of identification at work in the film. As such it asserts and celebrates the (forbidden) fascination of a female image for a female gaze.
‘Delilah’ is about moving energy through the lesbian body, about overcoming fear through love and how our own projections can shape what is in front of us. ‘Delilah’ is a space where cultural difference is non-oppositional and gender a continuum. Awareness of identity can lead to presumptions about content and audience, and the search for identity through a reflection of oneself is reductive. “Difference” has taken me into dream time, where transformation is matter. It is within the dream that we form our own future.
– Tanya Syed, September 1997
Description source: Beacons of Style touring programme
