Ent’racte

(2023)

11:20 minute single-channel video.

To request access to view Entr’acte, email hayleymillarbaker@gmail.com

Sitting between silent moving-image portraiture and performance, Entr’acte channels the sudden internal feelings of rage and its transformation into grief, rippling through the body and permeating all levels of the self. Taking its title from the French word ‘Entr’acte’ – referring to an interlude performed between two acts of a play – Entr’acte centres on a female protagonist as a vessel symbolising ‘woman’, burdened with the inequitable weight women are forced to carry across myriad experiences, identities, and roles. The film simultaneously embraces intimacy and intensity to convey women's monumental focus, determination, and power, capturing the moments after emotional shattering but before reactions or external ruptures. Neither documentary nor fiction, Entr’acte offers a poignant social commentary on the expectations imposed on women – lamenting the loss of free expression in a world marked by social and cultural inequities.

Women are conditioned to suppress emotions, project strength, and carry on in a world that affords little room or understanding for our experiences compared to men. This societal landscape dictates our bodies, subjects us to violence, and attempts to control our agency. In moments of grief or rage, women swiftly calculate their responses—whether to protest or strategise—under the weight of patriarchal expectations. Entr’acte challenges these norms by denying voyeuristic access to feminine rage, reclaiming women's right to express emotions authentically.

Drawing inspiration from distortions within the Medusa myth, Entr’acte emphasises how these narratives have been intricately controlled and warped through a patriarchal lens. Throughout history, gendered hierarchies have habitually depicted women as unreasonable and irrational, compelling them to suppress genuine emotions and conform their expressions accordingly. Entr’acte confronts the cinematic trend of portraying women as 'unstable'—a voyeuristic narrative that prompts audiences to distance themselves from such behaviours and encourages the emotional suppression of women. By challenging this harmful conditioning, Entr’acte aims to reclaim the narrative of female expression and agency. The protagonist, representational of ‘women’, asserts her right to embrace authentic emotional expression and choice, affirming her displays of anger and grief as profound and legitimate aspects of humanity, challenging societal norms that seek to suppress and invalidate women’s emotions.

‘The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.’ – Leslie Jamison, 2014, ‘The Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’.

Entr’acte was commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Creative Victoria for Between Waves, a Yalingwa exhibition series devoted to First Nations contemporary art, curated by Jessica Clark.