In Belladonna, the No Wave filmmaker Beth B has composed film portraits, combined with graphic works by the artist Ida Applebroog, to create a statement on the victimization of children and male violence. The short film is based on brief but horrifying monologues drawn from three different sources, recited by a cast of performers presented as “talking heads,” including filmmaker Jonas Mekas, milliner Judith Solodkin, and artist Todd Ayoung. The repetition of certain sequences magnifies the horror of the declarations, which are intercut with shots of paintings by Ida Applebroog, the filmmaker’s mother. The statements are taken from testimonies by the U.S. murderer Joel Steinberg, survivors of the experiments conducted by war criminal Josef Mengele, and clinical case studies taken from Sigmund Freud’s 1919 paper A Child Is Being Beaten. The intertwining of these sources creates new narratives by using a cinematic cut-up technique, whereas during the second part of the video, the texts are recited in full to reveal the atrocities referred to in the texts. The themes addressed in 
Belladonna accord with the spirit of the No Wave scene of the 1970s and 80s and its cinema—as raw and aggressive as its music—when it “depicted a reality that the mainstream media ignored, and that rock club audiences recognised as their own.” [1] This characteristic is apparent even in the work’s title—Belladonna—a poisonous plant traditionally used by some Renaissance women to dilate their pupils with the purpose of obtaining a dark gaze, considered at the time a standard of beauty. The choice of title, associated with the theme of the video, suggests a reflection on the toxicity of the male gaze, whether directed at women’s bodies or children’s lives. Interest in such subjects is rooted in a desire to break away from the smooth and sanitized nature of artistic norms, according to Beth B, who sees a focus on the social margins as a way to highlight how certain people “have been branded, stigmatized, and judged by a society that refuses to hear the terror in the voice of the abused child who then grows up to be a serial killer; refuses to educate a society of judgmental racists and sexists who persecute people based on the color of their skin or sexual orientation; refuses to recognize the extreme economic disparity between the wealthy and the poor.” [2]

Nicolas Ballet, December 2024
Translated by Timothy Stroud


[1] Marc Masters, No Wave (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p. 145.

[2] Beth B cited by Joan Hawkins in Downtown Film & TV Culture 1975-2001 (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2015).