ABSTRACT
The images in Leslie Thornton’s 1983 film, Adynata, are lush and one consistently gets the sense of an overwhelming surplus of the signifier: a rippling piece of bright red silk which fills the frame; jewelry, ornamentation, and clothing designed to connote the Otherness of the “Oriental”; exotic flowers and grasses in lavish botanical gardens; a close-up of bright blue, undulating waves of water; silk slippers against wicker edged by peacock feathers and deep green leaves of tropical plants. The colors are extremely vivid and work to amplify what at first glance appears to be an unruly fetishism of the exotic object. There is too much for the eye—the film seemingly capitulates to the seductive force of visual pleasure. But this richness of the image is somewhat deceptive. It is itself already a second-order signifier of an exoticism associated with the discourse of Orientalism which is both quoted and criticized by the film. And, for Thornton, the discourse of Orientalism is precisely a discourse of excess, of hyperbole, of the absurd. In Adynata she investigates the mise-en-scène of Orientalism—the conglomeration of sounds and images which connote the Orient for a Western viewer/auditor.
