The Oyster Effect

Using as a starting point parts of archive footage shot by De Martino’s team during his first research on Tarantism, “The Oyster Effect” develops into a collage of historical references as narrating voices over a visual journey. In the film, the portrayal of women and hysteria is shown as a series of parallels between built environments, architectural spaces, landscape and their narration. The viewer travels through foreign languages and non-desc<x>riptive locations, in a journey that challenges linearity and historicism. The attempt to bridge the specific representations of women’s subjectivity as products of their cultural environments, in the north and southern Europe, is persistently negated by the conflicting relation between image and narrating voice.