Great movie for a forgotten daughter
Irish filmmaker Ein Stapleton focuses on Lucia Joyce in her film “Horrible Creature”. The search for traces in dance in Switzerland is poetic.
In this film, American dancer Michelle Boule deals with the personality of Lucia Joyce.
Ein Stapleton is under a lot of pressure right now. Born in 1983, the Irish director, choreographer and dancer completed the German subtitling for his second film, Horrible Creature, premiered in Switzerland. She is also preparing her new multimedia installation, “Somewhere in the Body,” which will be on display in Dublin, Trieste and Strasbourg in 2022.
Lucia Joyce is the focus of both works. Many biographers smile at the daughter of James Joyce, a phenomenon that distracted the great writer from his works with his own artistic ambitions and unstable mind. For director Lucia Joyce, who lived from 1907 to 1982, she was a curious personality who went from being a professional dancer and musician to a psychiatrist in the mid-1930s.
Impact rather than disease
Lucia Joyce has died at the age of 75 in a clinic in Northampton, UK. “Despite her long history, getting information about Lucia is not easy,” Stapleton said in a Zoom conversation. Cause: “Stephen Joyce, James Joyce’s longtime estate administrator, is known to have destroyed part of Lucia’s correspondence with her father and author, Samuel Beckett.”
Stapleton suspects that Lucia Joyce is actually schizophrenic and has been diagnosed by some of her doctors. Instead, Lucia Joyce’s unpredictable response to a post – traumatic stress disorder caused by the difficult family circumstances in which she grew up – and possible sexual abuse.
Like Lucia Joyce, she has had some personal trauma, Stapleton says. It is not for nothing that she draws similarities between her biography and the biography of Lucia Joyce in her first film, Medicated Milk (2016). “In my previous films about Lucia, I explored how one can feel one’s body more deeply, how one can deal with trauma through the medium of dance and thus find a way to heal,” the director explains.
Dance in Simplon
For “terrible work”, Stapleton chose a radical but meaningful approach. She portrayed her internationally acclaimed fellow dancers Michelle Boule (USA), Sarah Ryan (Ireland) and Celine Laurel (France) dancing as Lucia Joyce. The film was shot in major Swiss locations in Lucia Joyce’s Vita.
The Joyce family dances with three women in Simplon, who emigrated to Switzerland from Italy in 1915, and Lucia Joyce dances in the German-speaking Zurich Hutton School building and in the psychiatric ward at the Hospital de Prancins, not far from Geneva. .
In the movie, quotes from Lucia’s letters and medical reports are read off screen. New wave-tinged music by David Best and Ed Chiers reinforces the depressing mood of depressing choreography, dark corridors, and the tragic story of Lucia Joyce.
She influenced his novel
At the same time, “Horror Creation” has a poetic spirit that saves this unconventional documentary from its basic tragedy. “I tried to break the common prejudice against Lucia,” Stapleton said. “It was important to me to show her versatility and sharpen the passion she experienced while dancing.”
Stapleton now visits the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich and Fritz Sen, a well-known Joyce translator, as part of his research into a planned installation. According to Stapleton, “Somewhere in the Body” is about how Lucia Joyce and the dance media influenced her father’s novel “Finn’s Wake”. “In particular, I would like to examine how Lucia’s biography shaped the various rough drafts of ‘Finngans Wake’ written and rejected by James Joyce.”
“Terrible Creature”, IRL / CH, 2020; Director: Ein Stapleton; With Michelle Boule, Sarah Ryan and Celine Laurer; 65 minutes. The film premieres on Sunday, February 13 at 12 noon Kino Refraf As shown in Zurich.
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