The Yellow Wallpaper

Director: Katrin Pesch    → show biography   ← hide biography

Biography: Katrin Pesch is an artist, filmmaker and writer. She holds a PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a Concentration in Art Practice from the University of California San Diego. An alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program, she has exhibited internationally in film festivals, art spaces and museums. Her writing has been published in Studies in French Cinema and Anthropology and Humanism, and several edited collections. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor for Film Studies at University of Southern Mississippi.

Country: Germany

Year: 2008

Synopsis: Adaptation of the short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1891) by the US-American author and women's rights activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper is the detailed fictional report of a woman suffering from a temporary nervous depression. She is prescribed a rest cure, which enforces strict isolation and forbids social contacts or intellectual stimulation. Alone in her bedroom, under the scrutiny of her family, the woman begins to observe the room's yellow wallpaper more and more obsessively, until she eventually recognizes a woman trapped in the paper – herself. My interest for a filmic adaptation stemmed from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s description of space, which is at the same time analytic and transgressive. The narrator’s exact and analytic depictions of the social and architectural environment are juxtaposed with the imaginary world of the wallpaper and create a scenario that is both liberating and frightening. The film is entirely composed out of still images punctuated by intertitles. The images were shot in an untenanted house in Beverly Hills and digitally manipulated to evoke the impression of papered walls in the otherwise empty rooms. The estate, the house and the rooms set the stage for the film's main.

Language: English

Tags: Experimental film