Big Movie Star

photo A.W.Doom

interview with Nemo
by Anna Lina Litz

Nelli graduated this year (’25) from Gerrit Rietveld Academy - Image and Language dept. She presented a video, a performance and a thesis under the title “Big Movie Star”. They feature a succesfull actress from the silent movie era that experiences a mental crises when she acts in her first talking movie. Nelli is developing an extended version of her performance with live music that she’ll try out at artistic research studio in september ‘25. Anna lina Litz talks with her about her thesis and performance.

ALL: What were your initial inspirations and influences behind making this work? How did you come to the topic of the Big Movie Star and the moment between silence and sound?

NM: I had a bunch of texts written already about certain feelings and experiences. The way I write it is very — of course it's based on my own experience, but I try to be very bodily about it. I dissect a moment in a very hyper specific way, sometimes reading too much into it, really spiralling inward into the moment and almost exhausting myself in what it could mean. So I had a bunch of this very analytical writing about things that are perhaps not very analytical, aka emotions, feelings, bodily experiences. A sort of fight between an analytical mind and an experiential body.

It was quite late into the thesis process that there was actually a narrative that came to mind in conversation with one of my teachers. It was something I had been interested in before, so I had some background information on it already.

pages from Nelli Molfenter’s thesis

The bold paragraphs that provide the structure,: “okay, it's this guy. And then this guy talks to that guy”, those really came about in the last like month or two. I also really wanted to make a timeline: The character that I'm writing about, when was she born? What year is it, around the time she's having this breakdown? Where are we in the world? So I don’t lose my footing in the process.

That was always feedback I got: that my work is very isolated in the sense that I'm not really trying to explain much. It’s not like I have a character who goes from A to B. So sometimes it can be very convoluted and even boring. That’s why I wanted to bring in this almost ironic context of the Movie Star and flashlights and all these weird characters who are also very cliche.

photo A.W.Doom

ALL: You refer to theoretical texts as well. Were those a starting point or did they come later in the process?

NM: They came in between, once I had the narrative. In the Image and Language department you can write a fictional text as a thesis, but you need at least a couple of sources. I was reading Hito Steyerl’s essay ‘Free Fall’, and what was interesting to me were her points on “traditional” perspectives. I tried to weave this in thematically. And then there were other sources about cinema from which I took direct quotes. For example there's one quote: “a loud audience for silent films became a silent audience for films with sound”, that dynamic changed and I thought that was very interesting.

I actually watched a silent movie yesterday. I'm in Berlin right now, and they showed ‘Rosenkavalier’ with a live orchestra. The conductor had a small screen in front of him playing the movie, which was amazing. A common critique of those early silent films that were accompanied by an orchestra was that sometimes they missed a beat, or they were lagging behind, the music wasn't synchronized. I thought that was also really great. But this orchestra was perfect.

photo Nelli molfenter

ALL: For your performance, you’re working with an organ player, right? How come?

NM: I worked together with Ian (Ian Marquez Garcia, “Organ Player”) for another project, for Erin McClain who's also doing my costume. She asked us to make a song for her show, and working together was really easy. He can just very simply play a melody and I can very simply react to it. So there's just this very intuitive process of: okay, let's make a song and I'll think of some lyrics. We made a song within 15 minutes or so, and then we performed that. I also just really like the sound of organs. I mean, we’ll see — he has a sort of tiny old piano that works really well with the idea of the Kurbelkasten, because you also have to turn a small lever at the side for it to play. I like the sound of something that's a bit older and maybe also a bit strange. It isn’t clean or nice, but it’s beautiful.

I think this goes into another question as well. The way I create sound, also together with Ian, is far more sensory than image-making. Image making is very logic-based, but music touches on something more bodily.

ALL: I’m really curious to see it and hear it.

NM: I mean, you're also a musician, so you probably know more than I do.

ALL: Yes, but I've just been playing classical music. Improvising and being creative with my instrument is something I still want to learn.

NM: So interesting, because I have no clue how sheet music works. I did piano for a little bit growing up, but it wasn't really activating for me to sit there and just repeat something. I memorised different melodies as a kid, and I had these songs in my head, but they would kind of disappear into the ether because I had no way of writing them down. With Ian it’s like: great, you can do that part, and that’s why we work well together because I also let him experiment and try things out.

ALL: So you’ll be singing as well, during the performance?

NM: I don't think so. Maybe at the end, maybe in the beginning, but more a practice type of singing. In my graduation work, I made a song — a German song, of all things. My teachers really liked it. I also like it. Annelies also likes it. Everyone's very adamant on me singing it. And it was in the video, but I took the sound away, and I explained to my tutors and to myself that there was something off about the flow. It’s all about this character who's trapped in her mind and in her world. And then suddenly you are thrown into a very real moment, with voice and image playing at the same time. I feel like that's also what shocked people back in the day when you suddenly hear something on screen and see an image. So something about that in the video was just very — It didn’t seem to match with the logic of the character and what this character is afraid of. But also when you experience it as a viewer, you're kind of thrown into the “real” world, which is not what I'm trying to do. Even though it is nice. I mean, the story follows the Big Movie Star failing to keep up with the times. A lot of actors, like those who didn't have a voice that matched their on screen persona or with strong accents , were pushed out of the industry. They had to figure out, from one moment to the next, what to do instead. And these were incredibly successful and famous people. In my story, the Big Movie Star’s agent tells her: OK, if you can't do it on the screen, you do it on the stage. And if you can't do it on the stage, you do it on the street. My graduation film shows her trying to be on stage and also failing at that. And for that I needed the focus to remain on her expression and not her voice. But your question w
as if I'm going to sing, and my answer is maybe.

ALL: I want to get a bit deeper into the actual details of the text and some of the recurring metaphors you use. Like the moth and the light, and the concept of flatness, being flattened, the way that screens are flat and maybe they also flatten reality.

NM: Yeah, moths were interesting because of the saying — I mean, it's very cliche, but I do love a cliche and I love going into cliches and exploring them again to the point of exhaustion, because I think they are accessible to a large group of people. People know them and hear them all the time. Especially for me as a non-native speaker, I was always really interested in those idioms in English. Moths hit against lights because these lights mess with their orientation system. Usually they use the moon for orientation, which they can’t crash into. But when there’s a closer light source, like a lamp or flame, their bodies just kind of malfunction. They start hitting the lamp over and over again. And I thought that's a perfect metaphor for this Movie Star who's pursuing this very tantalizing, very attractive and also disorienting thing, aka stardom, and losing touch, losing perspective in that process.

And with the flatness, I think this is where my own experience lent itself quite well. With our devices and how we're interacting with them nowadays, there's a big focus on our image, displaying ourselves or seeing ourselves, presenting ourselves. And whether you want to or not, I think that can very easily take you away from experiencing the world in front of you. I'm interested in seeing what this psychological process is. It also connects to what I said before, the very analytical mind versus the bodily experience, and the flattening that can happen to experience when you overanalyse situations. And there's another flattening that happens just by telling stories. History is also something that needs to be flattened for us to even comprehend what has happened over time, and there’s a lot you can criticise in that. But also on the personal level, how do you see yourself? That's all a narrative, and it's all something you have to make sense of. But yeah, those were all things that I wanted to funnel into a character. I flatten it myself by telling this story. But through this story I hope to elicit the larger questions of why she is so afraid of language and why she has such a hard time with it.

Oh, and this is also something that I was interested in: the fact that she can't really make the jump from silent to sound. No one tells her: “you have a disgusting voice.” It's that she just can’t, she doesn't want to. It's really an internal struggle of “I don’t know if I can let people in like that.” Hearing a sound and the sensory act of talking is very different from acting, miming and posing. And I think BMS is a person who knows that if she were to let the audience go that deep, things would just muddle even more. I think that's where we're also at now with our technology. You don't know how deep this sort of thing goes until it's there and making itself known.

photo A.W.Doom

ALL: In the text, there’s this flickering between the meta and the real. I was never quite sure whether we were in the movie or not. There’s a moment where I thought we were not, and then we are!

NM: Yes! I'm really glad that worked out. I watched this movie called ‘Perfect Blue’ and there was also this one scene where the character is in a TV show and it just blurs so perfectly between fiction and reality. I loved it, because it cuts so deep. Everyone kind of has this fear of: what if I lose my mind one day?

ALL: Another theme that comes back again and again is spinning.

NM: I see these loose connections between the moth that spirals inward and the spiraling that can happen internally, if you're thinking too much. And ‘spinnen’ in German, like ‘du spinnst doch!’ (‘You’re crazy!’). In mental institutions back in the day, they had women do the work of spinning wool. I just love taking those themes and playing with them and really expanding them and taking them with me throughout the whole text.

ALL: My last couple of questions are about the relationship between the text and the performance. What comes first for you and how do you translate between those different forms?

photo Nelli molfenter

NM: The written thesis was very much directed by school requirements. But I tried to write how I speak, or write in a way that should be read out loud. So I would almost say that the thesis in its written form is not as effective as I think the performance will be. I wouldn't necessarily say one goes before the other, but in my process I've noticed that I do really write for things to be said out loud.

ALL: That’s interesting, because it’s mostly written in the third person and to me it reads like a beautiful piece of writing that can also stand alone.

NM: I remember one of my teachers in high school — I took a film class and I wrote a script. When I asked for feedback the teacher said it was good but you don’t write it like a script, you write as if it's prose. I kind of like going in between those forms, where there's still narration and sometimes spurs of prose. For the performance I’m thinking of different ways of bringing those metaphors to life with choreography and voiceing. There will also be moments of music and sound like Ian’s organ playing. During the graduation show I only performed the first part, and his time it’s an abbreviated version of the whole text. I really concentrated on the parts that I find exciting.

Nelli Molfenter (NEMO) is a german artist working with performance video text sound painting drawing doors paper cuts...
She recently graduated at the image and language department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy

photo A.W.Doom

video Nelli Molfenter