Ann-Sofi Sidén; QM BENEATH THE BED, 1998 Film still from QM

In Ann-Sofi Sidén's film QM-I think I call her QM we see a mixture of a Neolithic 'ur-woman' and a powerful female mud wrestler becoming a subject for the paranoid Dr. Fielding's quasi-scientific studies. The film continues a story told in two earlier works by her. by LARS O. ERICSSON, Siksi No 1 Spring 1998

Ann-Sofi Sidén's film QM-I think I call her QM is a complex weave of moving images, in which myth is interleaved with reality, fiction with pseudoscientific rationality, dreams with waking, fears and inadequacies with surveillance and control, longing for intimacy with projected paranoia. The warp of this cloth is made up of some of our deepest notions about humanness, women and reason; about reality, relationships, normality and madness.     The film, which was co-directed with Tony Gerber, constitutes a strange amalgam of two earlier works, Queen of Mud (QM) and No. 144. In the film world, but not in the artworld (which is Ann-Sofi Sidén's home ground), such 'cannibalistic' goings on are still highly unusual. Since 1989, the Queen of Mud (QM), who is always played by Sidén herself, has manifested herself in a series of different guises and contexts: performances, photographs and digital videos on CD. Some years ago, dressed only in her mud garb, QM also made an infamous visit to the perfume department at NK in Stockholm (she was quickly removed by the store's security guards).     No. 144-It's by confining one's neighbor that one is convinced of one's own sanity is the story of New York psychiatrist Alice E. Fabian, who towards the end of her life believes that she is being eavesdropped on and subject to destructive laser rays. In 1994, taking her point of departure from Dr. Fabian's surviving notes, diaries, photographs, tape recordings and library (predominantly of psychiatric literature), Ann-Sofi Sidén made an installation in Alice E. Fabian's apartment at 53 W 9th Street in New York.     In the new film, we again meet both of these main characters: QM and Alice E. Fabian, alias Dr. Ruth Fielding (played by Kathleen Chalfant). QM, who is a mixture of Neolithic 'ur-woman' and powerful female mud wrestler, becomes a subject for the paranoid Dr. Fielding's quasi-scientific studies, after QM is found early one morning under Dr. Fielding's bed. The windows are bricked up with books, and communication with the surrounding world takes place via monitors and a speaker phone. Shut in a room that most closely resembles a combination of a prison cell and a pigsty, QM too is kept under watch with the aid of surveillance cameras. Dr. Fielding speaks an account of her investigations of QM's behaviour into a tape recorder.     This both bizarre and ambiguous chamber play constantly shifts-despite its apparently realistic language-between dream and actuality, reality and fiction, myth and psychological drama. Is QM real or the mental projection of someone suffering from a persecution mania and ridden with guilt (Fielding's relationship with her daughter Ingrid comes across as problematic, to say the least)? What psychological lumber, what fears, prejudices and secret desires is Dr. Fielding projecting with the aid of her pseudo-scientific rhetoric onto the Mud Woman QM? Ann-Sofi Sidén; TED GETTING CLOSER TO QM, 1998 Film still from QM By covering QM with mud, Sidén plays on the archaic idea of the feminine as a malleable thing, which passively allows itself to be shaped. "For man creates for himself an image of woman, and woman moulds herself according to that image", Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science. Ruth Fielding is definitely a woman, but she uses a masculine, professional language that she has acquired as a psychiatrist. A language that objectifies and distances. QM is treated as a study subject, not as a fellow human being. Put less in terms of a critique of reason, QM could be said to symbolise the alienated part of ourselves (or that from which society and rational culture have alienated us). QM is the wild, the mute, the untamed and the monstrous, which is concealed in the core of civilisation.     Fielding's semi-scientific language and attitude serve not only as armour against QM, they also constitute a kind of support corset for Fielding's own disengaged psyche. Fielding's methods, which exclude empathy and reciprocity, function both as a kind of intellectual masturbation and as a shield against affection. Through her detached attitude to the ur-woman QM, Fielding manages to keep the doors of her own mental closet shut. When she has sent a parcel to her daughter Ingrid containing things that her daughter played with as a child, she gets it back with a note from her daughter saying: "Why must you always send me all the trash that falls out of your closets?". What we are unable to cope with in ourselves, we project onto others.     QM, who is as yet unshaped by civilisation, finally manages to escape Fielding's disciplining manipulations. She runs away, but to what? Into the closed psychic closet again?~ QM-I think I call her QM Directors: Ann-Sofi Sidén & Tony Gerber. Producers: Julianne Hausler & Cathy Pellow. Script: Ann-Sofi Sidén. Cinematography: Steve Kazmierski. Editing: Tom McArdle. Set designer: Ellen Wagget. Music: Jonathan Bepler. Sound: Adam Goldstein. Actors: Kathleen Chalfant as Ruth Fiedling, Ann-Sofi Sidén as QM, Emanuel Xuereb as Ted, Dennis Reid as Phone man, Paul Giangrossi as Bike messenger, Ulf Lovén as Mean faced fucker.