Ent’racte

(2023)

11:20 minute single-channel video.

Curators can request a preview link by emailing hayleymillarbaker@gmail.com

Sitting between silent moving-image portraiture and performance, Entr’acte channels the sudden inner feelings of rage and their transformation into grief, rippling through the body and permeating all levels of the self. Taking its title from the French word ‘Entr’acte’, referring to an interlude performed between two acts of a play, Entr’acte focuses on a female protagonist as a vessel symbolising ‘woman’, burdened with the inequitable weight women are forced to carry across myriad experiences, identities, and roles. The film simultaneously conveys intimacy and intensity to portray women's monumental focus, determination, and power, capturing the moments that follow emotional shattering but precede reactions or external ruptures. Neither documentary nor fiction, Entr’acte provides a powerful social commentary on the expectations placed on women, lamenting the loss of free expression in a world shaped by social and cultural inequalities.

Women are conditioned to suppress emotions, project strength, and carry on in a world that offers little space or understanding for our experiences compared to men. This societal framework dictates our bodies, subjects us to violence, and seeks to control our agency. In moments of grief or anger, women quickly weigh their responses, whether to protest or strategise, under the burden of patriarchal expectations. Entr’acte challenges these norms by denying voyeuristic access to feminine rage, reclaiming women's right to express emotions authentically.

Drawing inspiration from distortions within the Medusa myth, Entr’acte emphasises how these stories have been carefully manipulated and twisted through a patriarchal perspective. Historically, gendered hierarchies have often portrayed women's emotions and confessions as unreasonable and irrational, forcing them to conform to their expressed and genuine emotions accordingly. Entr’acte confronts the cinematic tendency to depict women as 'unstable', a voyeuristic portrayal that encourages audiences to distance themselves from such behaviours and promotes emotional suppression of women. By challenging this damaging conditioning, Entr’acte seeks to reclaim the narrative of female expression and agency. The protagonist, representing ‘women’, asserts her right to embrace authentic emotional expression and choices, affirming her anger and grief as valid and legitimate aspects of being human, and contesting societal norms that aim to silence and dismiss women’s humanness.

‘The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.’ – Leslie Jamison, 2014, ‘The Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’.

Entr’acte was commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Creative Victoria for Between Waves, a Yalingwa exhibition series devoted to First Nations contemporary art, curated by Jessica Clark.