PS Alum Macklin Kowal at The Visitor premiere, photo by Bruce LaBruce
PS alum Macklin Kowal (MA '13) stars in Bruce LaBruce’s film The Visitor, which has just had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival. The film is a remake of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, reimagined as an indictment of state racism and anti-migrant politics. Produced by a/political, Alex Babboni, and Victor Fraga, The Visitor is dressed in LaBruce’s characteristically subversive approach to film history, camp aesthetics, and porn.
On the experience of acting in the film, Kowal says, “I found an incredible opportunity in this process—an outlet to bring my training in Performance Studies to bear on a work that advances theory through practice. Informed by psychoanalytic, queer, and critical race theory, Bruce invited us into a world that was as much his vision as it was ours to shape. Throughout the process, I recalled lectures with Karen Shimakawa on the abject—that which performs difficulty by its eliciting disgust and fascination at once (there’s a shit eating scene that I hope she’ll like, eminent scholar of Kristeva as she is); lectures with André Lepecki on the erotics of performance; lectures with our dearly departed José Esteban Muñoz on queerness’s radical imagining of future worlds. The film takes particular influence from psychoanalytic theory, expanding on Freud’s notions of the awkward erotic currents that run through nuclear families; my ongoing exchanges with Ann Pellegrini since graduating shaped my approach to my character. PS at NYU really primed me to offer my performance as thoughtful, as critically rigorous. The process of making this film granted me a deeper appreciation of my time in the program. For those of us advancing careers as performers, PS guides us to consider our work as true intervention.”
The Visitor received rave reviews in Variety and Rolling Stone, and will be touring cinema festivals in the months ahead—including a screening in New York. Stay tuned!
Congratulations Macklin!
