On Saturday 16 May, I found myself among a dribble of mismatched film buffs shuffling into an upstairs room at Brunswick’s Balam Balam Place. We were sparsely seated in the cramped space, the windows were blacked out by aluminium foil, the chairs were plastic and probably rentals. A forlorn portable projector sat before us—like the ones used to screen outdated sex-ed videos in high school. As a festival volunteer scrolled past Netflix and Amazon Prime to reach the chosen file, the audience murmured in a collective amusement at the make-shift charm of the iconic Brunswick Underground Film Festival. We had all gathered on this bright morning for a retro screening of the 1976 Swedish film We Have Many Names. Surmised by the festival team as an exploration of “despair and hope in the wake of divorce,” the film proved to be a curious contemplation and carnal imagining of the act of loving as a violent sacrifice for women. 

Written, directed and starring Mai Zetterling, who was once a muse of the enigmatic auteur Ingmar Bergman, the film offered a primal rendering of jagged female torment. The narrative follows the obscure Lena as she succumbs to an emotional breakdown after her husband leaves her for a younger woman. As her identity begins to dissipate, her agony is brooded over as she faces a wider philosophical battle against the position and condition of womanhood. After drifting in and out of a psychological breakdown, she finally decides to accept ultimate defeat and divorce him. To her, she had sacrificed her life, her body and her spirit to love a man who had discarded her and treated her like a possession no longer useful to him. She had acquiesced to her many roles as a woman and now, after performing what was expected of her by God, she had been divinely punished. We Have Many Names became a fascinating feminist speculation on the exaggerated weight of being a woman in a world that fears and therefore must destroy you. Perhaps outdated and cramped in its examination of gender roles, the film still carried with it a feisty opposition to the continuing deeply rooted patriarchal aversion towards femininity and women’s bodies.

I was entrapped by its preoccupation with the horrors of the female body as a terrifying life giver, and perhaps even life taker. Zetterling streaked her canvas red, gnashing at the thought of women as being hated by men because of our perhaps incomprehensible, supernatural and otherworldly nature. This view of woman as a ghostly corpse, as a martyred Christ bearing all of humanity's sins, finds her too terrifying to comprehend. Zetterling reckons with woman’s destiny to be loathed, surviving this if she conceals her grotesqueness by enslaving herself to a man she loves. In a tremendous spell of rage, Zetterleng misshapes and casts aside a psychoanalytic perspective of masculine castration anxiety. She draws in hypnotic religious iconography with her protagonist’s embodiment of the fallen Eve, now the rising Lilith and refuses this too, returning to something more ancient and even pagan. The spectrally textured film had an unruly experimentalist and richly symbolic quality. I enjoyed its often anachronistic presence, flinging us between many different times and spaces perhaps beyond the real world. As Lena dwells in a hysteria, we are repeatedly arrested by the unmoveable gaze of a Dream Girl who seems to be a younger her. 

Throughout the film, Lena’s dreams navigate a liminality of psychosis as she glides between a surrealist nightmare landscape of despair and the cold domestic home of her real world—where she abuses substances to cope. Lena is seen wrapped in chains; meandering down dark pathways dragging a bright chandelier; repeating frustratingly simple tasks like expelling her husband's clothes into his bag; posing naked and covered in blood, palms nailed through; and surrounded by the bodies of female mannequins. It seemed to be saying; when women are thrown aside like dolls, we will lay piled together until we amass an army to avenge ourselves. Finally, a call from her yappy mother pulls Lena out of her misery and she begins to contemplate hope for a renewal. This is like one of her dreams where women and children playfully dance to folk music dressed in white. In a final glimpse of hope when Lena tidies up her shattered belongings and leaves her home to confide in another divorced woman, we are offered a humorously ironic quote. The woman says; “Love … such an important word but so little letters in one’s vocabulary.” Lena’s desire for romantic love seems obsolete.

 A wailing bundle of feminine rage and agony, We Have Many Names is both sober and melodramatic in its encapsulation of a woman's vast emotional range. In her manic feminist sketch, Zetterleng cries for an Eden where Adam never existed.