Accursed Mazurka - Nina Fonoroff

The Accursed Mazurka – Nina Fonoroff
1994, 16mm, Color, 40 Min.

The film begins with a shot of a wall on which painted cards and a bouquet of flowers are hung. A woman’s voice describes how a woman was made mad by repeated exposure to a Chopin Mazurka on the radio. Throughout the film, it is unclear if and when this woman is herself speaking, because the third person is often used. This makes more sense as the film progresses and we understand the woman’s declining sense of self, to the point where it would make sense for her to refer to herself in the third person.
The movie reads like an attempt by the unseen protagonist to represent her illness while at the same time understand and explore it. There are many motifs used throughout, including windows and window shades (often with a woman opening or closing the shade), notes from a journal, trees and leafs, and drawings.
These images read to me like the base through which the more narrative images (such as those illustrating what is being said and those with people in them) are viewed. I say ‘through which’ because the narrative images often have ‘base’ images superimposed on them.
If this is a woman’s attempt to recapture and understand her mental state, this reading makes sense to me in that these base images feel private and hallucinatory, and it is hard to clearly see the narrative images just as it is sometimes hard to clearly recall a memory. Maybe they should be read as the product of her attempts to visually represent the emotions attached to her memories of this time. Reading the film through base and narrative images makes sense if we accept that what we see on the screen is viewed through her.
Further, while these narrative images help us understand what is happening in the plot, it would be impossible to understand the themes and emotional state of the woman were we not, literally, looking through these base images.
The narrative is revealed through shots of a hospital along with audio of doctors and nurses discussing a new patient. One of the only narrative shots without anything layered on top of it is of the outside of a hospital, to which, we’re to understand from the audio, the woman is being taken. This clear shot, which is viewed on its own rather than through a base image, could signal that at the moment she was not “accursed”.
Throughout the film close attention is necessary in order to try and sort out the visual and aural information. We understand that the woman is undergoing treatment at the mental hospital. Her reason for being there is explained through images of machinery and people using machines, such as telephone operators. They read as a metaphor for her “bad wiring”.
To respond to this film I tried to think about what it did and did not accomplish. I never felt a connection with any characters, and actually wasn’t certain if I could distinguish them all the time. This isn’t a failure on the films part, since I don’t think it was trying to make you feel empathetic towards the woman. It works in this film because it’s about a woman who has lost touch with herself.
It did make me feel uncomfortable at times. The larger implications of the special effects (blurring or making someone have a double) and repeated images seemed like the point of the movie, and the woman herself wasn’t as important.
I was surprised at the end, after noting all the motifs in the film, when it ends with the words “No motif”. Thinking back to the title, perhaps this refers to the music she claims drove her mad?
While I didn’t love this movie, it was well done and interesting on a lot of levels. It’s similar to the kind of movie enjoy making, so it was great to watch how it was put together.