Saturday     14:30
The Chopin House
2024, 6 min., English

Director: Dayna McLeod

A video essay that isolates the title characters’ rage in the 1991 film, Thelma and Louise (directed by Ridley Scott) against personal and systemic patriarchal violence. Using animation, multiscreen, and supercut editing, this video essay supposes what happens when supporting male characters are removed, erased, or diminished to focus our attention on Thelma and Louise’s response(s) to their violent acts. It also imagines mudflap girls—now women—talking and fighting back against their oppressor. Finally, this video essay transforms Thelma and Louise’s suicidal leap into a deep dive of the vagina, often essentialized as synonymous with the female body.

Dayna McLeod is a performance-based media artist and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow at Middlebury College (2023-2025). She actively engages queer and feminist approaches to research-creation through art and media. She is part of a collaborative videographic project, Ways of Doing, which fosters an ethical praxis of audiovisual research with Lucy Fife Donaldson (University of St. Andrews), Colleen Laird (University of British Columbia), and Alison Peirse (University of Leeds). Her video essays have been published in [in] Transition, Teknokultura: Journal of Digital Culture and Social Movements, and Intermédialités: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies.