
Blood
Blood
23 min, 2015
Director:
Marianna Simnett
Blood restages a botched nose operation, originally performed on Freud’s patient, Emma Eckstein. Wilhelm Fliess, an otolaryngologist and collaborator of Freud, believed that the nose was inextricably linked to the genitals, and could be operated on to cure women of menstrual cramps, masturbation, and hysteria.
In Simnett’s retelling, postoperative delirium puts the young heroine Isabel into a surrealist state. She meets her missing nose bones and Lali, a ‘sworn virgin’ from the north of Albania, who has renounced her biological identity and elected, from an early age, to live life as a man. Isabel is on the cusp of puberty and has to come to terms with what womanhood means in this trippy coming-of-age tale.