After having spent a day trying to come to terms with what I watched in “Une Danse des Bouffons” by Marcel Dzama, I have come to only one conclusion- Marcel Dzama must have had a lot of bad experiences growing up.  The 35 minute black and white clip is supposed to be a story that weaves together “good versus evil, death and rebirth, love and lost love, multiple identities and doppelgängers, false prophets, the corruption of power, and tensions between reality and fiction” (Jones, 1). However, taken at face value, the film tells the story of a freaky trickster forcing a woman watch her loved one recite haunting codes (only after reading the press release did I realize they were chess moves), the Joker beheading a horse, a clown blowing off the Joker’s head, the clown reattaching the horse’s head to the Joker’s body, and finally a man coming out of horse-Joker’s giant, full upper-torso vagina.

It was the craziest, most traumatic, terrifying thing that I’ve ever watched, yet by the end I was completely mesmerized.

The film had a strange, hypnotic effect, beginning with the woman being forced to watch her man say chess codes and die. It reminded me of a brainwashing tactic used in a Communist, or dictatorial regime: beat the man to death, then force him to say certain things. It was certainly an interesting experience, and helped me understand the plight of people living in countries where things like this were practiced.

The dancers and masks, however, were too unsettling. Their bizarre and seemingly heartless actions reminded me of the story of clowns being serial killers. The main man, who bore a striking resemblance to the Joker, didn’t help- the Joker from Batman was known for being insane and whimsical, but Dzama’s Joker went further-he was more sadistic and gruesome, and his henchmen more terrifying. The Joker character added to the spooky and tense scene, and made the scene much more disturbing.

The finale, however, was what scarred me for life. The resurrected Joker with the beheaded horse’s head unzipped his shirt to reveal a gigantic vagina that spanned the entire length of his body. Then, slowly and disgustingly, out came the man at the beginning of the video, nearly dead from the arrow wound he sustained at the hands of the trickster. At this point, I looked away, unable to watch the horror in its entirety. However, I also became fascinated by Dzama- he had no limits; no social boundaries confined his work. He was unafraid to display such graphic images- from the brainwashing, to the beheading to the “birth”-that normally people would condemn. I interpreted his work less as a story that combined many themes together, and more as a film that pushed the limits of what society would view as acceptable to watch. It was this aspect of the film that mesmerized me, although one run-through of “Une Danse des Bouffons” is enough to satisfy (or scar) me for a lifetime.

Jones, Branwen. “Marcel Dzama Une Danse Des Bouffons (A Jester’s Dance).” Une Danse Des Bouffons (A Jester’s Dance) » David Zwirner. N.p., 9 Sept. 2014. Web. 01 Oct. 2014.