Nuclear Nymphs

 (click on the cute purple link above)

Short experimental movie with spoken poetry. Author (director, writer, producer, cast, videographer, director of photography, editor, glitch artist, poet, singer, performer): Petra Brnardic. Year: 2024

“Nuclear Nymphs” is a short experimental film, a poetic dance story about love, hatred and revenge. It is a continuation of a “Leviathan of Desire” from 2018. (and, in some fragments, of “Succubi”, “Mermaid Song” and “The Black Swan Flaming Ocean”).

I weave a web of my own microcosmic narrative about fatal sirens, ondines, naiads, sea and water mythical creatures, such as their indirect foremother Tiamat, the dragon goddess of primordial chaos, but also vampires, succubi and aliens. I’ve been dealing with mythological creatures through my poetry and visual art since the turn of the century, and this project would be a testament to my obsession with all facets of female archetypes and the ways in which my fluid and multi-layered identity draws from that rich source and vast pool. The turbulent, dark and deep ocean is a metaphor for emotions, and the violent verbal images of seduction, castration and destruction are sadomasochistic and fetishistic fantasies after the death of a relationship that was meaningful to me or after trauma, which triggered numerous questions, breaks, pain and confusion. I nurture wings to rise from agony like a phoenix from the ashes or fight against despotic authority and the Name of the Father, in the shelter of wild nature and naked elements with which I am making love. I sexualize anger in order to create dramatic tension, and I process all motifs through the reconstruction of poetic language and playing with stylistic figures. I try to create a hypnotic, magical and mystical atmosphere, through linguistic acrobatics and ritualistically repetitive singing similar to a medieval liturgy or madrigal, in order to heal trauma and psychic fractures and to be reborn, as if from salt foam.

It is also significant that my father was a sailor and my name means “the rock”, and here my fictitious (anti)heroine acts as the ultimate siren who fights against what the Father psychoanalytically symbolizes, and in that battle the primal wildness of nature crushes and disintegrates sailing ships as ornate sea phalluses and returns the ocean to its primordial fold. In a way, I touch on Electra’s complex, but inversely: I long for the Father as a structuring monad that I never had, and all the characters of my story are contrary to his image and features of the soul. But trouble, sacrifice and temptation occur when the symbolic paternal backbone is broken and the ocean of Id goes wild and insane. 

The video was based on a poem I wrote immediately in English (I started writing poetry in it during quarantine, when I discovered the gorgeous, metamorphosing and meandering possibilities of a language that is not my mother’s tongue and with which I can play endlessly, juggling derivatives, synonyms and even words which I invented and dreamed up myself).

 I interlaced the film with igniting sensuality, with a focus on oral fixation (biting and sucking/licking, i.e. schizoid vs. depressive position in the psychoanalytic theory of the formation of object relations).

In “Leviathan of Desire”, also a film noir of sorts (although the crimes, collisions and psychological car crashes are blossoming within in both movies), I spoke about my melancholy, longing and desire, and through the relationship between a man and a woman I showed images and scenes of a nostalgic paradise, arcadia and utopia mixed with creepy and anxious. The pictures are memories of a summer vacation at sea on an Adriatic island, which aroused deep emotions in me. I unveiled interpersonal connection, sensuality, ferocious passion and tenderness, opposed to the feeling of loneliness and the fears that are triggered by it. Leviathan is a sea monster that, in my story and interpretation, casts spells on the lovers, and I enveloped everything in a black and white, silvery-pearl haze of surreal apparitions, and the maritime scenery is riddled with flashbacks to man-made elements, as recollections, foreshadowings, parallel reality, allusions or symbols (storefront, tunnel, key, chains, neon lights, glittering underground club tinsel, mirror, glass shards). The monstrosity of the mythological creatures alludes to the fatal nature of attraction, to fascination, but also to the destructiveness, toxicity and poisonousness of the obsession that a love relationship produces. The island, the seaside, the beach, the summer breeze and the darkness were a symbol for love isolation, where the fantasmagoric realities of idealization and disillusionment intertwine in a fervent tango of willful blindness, but also for the alienation of an individual (me) who is eternally searching for something that will truly reflect her core, but her fate is resigned to being in a haunted tower locked in herself waiting to fruitfully face a demon and ride him on the way to a potential happy ending of a personal saga. In other words, I turn my reality into fiction and I use many layers of building suspense, playing with visual imagery and capricious whimsicality of the words. They are my weapon and my surgical knife. And the fusion of both mediums serves me as a torch for navigation through painful imbroglio of the jungles of my mind.