The story about the Old Fat Girl. Chapter five: Notes about Dumb Angry Bull

The fifth chapter of The story about the Old Fat Girl by Alina Kleytman, entitled Notes about the Dumb Angry Bull, refers to violence against women. Off the camera, a female narrator whispers an ominous tale of a sense of danger and psychological entrapment. Although the carefully articulated words are almost devoid of intonation, anxiety grows with each phrase. The woman speaks quietly, so that her voice does not reach the ears of her oppressors. It is possible that she is talking to herself or relating her experiences to an unspecified person. Telling a tale is a tool for (self-)therapy, verbalising a nightmare and metaphorising traumatic memories.

The eponymous Old Fat Girl is a victim figure, emotionally traumatised and lacking in self-esteem. She lives in a room upholstered in black fur and filled with smelly teacups. She wears old fur thongs and a dress made of an old sack trimmed with purple fur and a gold chain. She is surrounded by characters that are figures of her torturers: the Dumb Angry Bull, the Sharp-Nosed Angry Beast and the Small Old Bitch. The plot of the fairy tale, which is built around the title character being furiously stalked by the Dumb Angry Bull, takes place in a school, which in itself is a space of oppression. The technical studio is a “dark, dirty, wet dungeon”, a “musty basement”. It is there that Little Old Bitch teaches the girls how to be women and run the house decently. Thus, in Kleytman’s perception, violence not only has an individual psychological or sexual dimension; it also manifests itself in the patriarchal social norms imposed on women. In these, the artist sees the tools for victimisation, the “production” of Old Fat Girls.

The video image does not illustrate the story. The verbal and visual layers are united only by the grotesque figure of the straining, prancing Bull, shown as a frame within a frame. The main shot captures a seated person, tightly wrapped in a dirty, torn quilt, from under which only a woman’s naked foot is visible. Critics have compared her to an amorphous block of marble, not yet sculpted. The words are accompanied by sounds of vigorous biting, chewing and smacking the lips, which can be understood as referring to attempts to alleviate trauma by eating, or to people being swallowed by the social machine and spat out as a programmed product. In this context, the anonymous figure appears as an individual who is undergoing moulding and attempts to protect themselves from mass social training.