Divine Feminine Negation: Christiane Cegavske's Blood Tea and Red String

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

To become a parent, specifically, to give birth, is to invite death into one’s mind as a constant. Giving birth made me feel like an animal, like a part of nature, subject to forces beyond my control. I had entered a cycle of creation and destruction. I felt like I’d joined the earth as a participant and as a subject. I have created, and now I am so acutely aware of degeneration—of my own, of everyone’s. I am aware of the encroachment of these forces on my child, and how impotent I am to do anything about it. There is a literal and a figurative aspect to this. There is her safety, but there is also her sweetness and her innocence. Her vulnerability is overwhelming to me, and as a result, I take tokens of her innocence to be precious. A soft toy that she imbues with life, a music box that plays a song that lulls her to sleep, these things are sacred to me and the thought of these objects being defiled in some way upsets me deeply. 

These are things I feel viscerally as a parent, but we all share this sense, because we remember the experience of being a child and retain aspects of that psychology. Something fundamentally fragile and simple that wants harmony and love and can be soothed with a lullaby. That’s why we have soft spots for things that are meant to recall the feeling of being comforted as a child. When it works, it is a pacifier. But when it misses the mark, like hollow flutes that distort a melody and pierce with ominous, sinking notes instead of the bright, sweet ones we desire and expect, the experience is disturbing. It reminds us that innocence is not safe and that nothing is as simple as we want it to be. Such is the destabilizing experience of Christiane Cegavske’s Blood Tea and Red String. 

Populated with felted creatures in human clothes who slowly prance around a semi-animated forest, the world that Cegavske has created should be comforting, but it is most definitely not. We begin in the cabin belonging to The Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak: hybrid critters with curly teddy bear fur, the beak of a crow, and ears that resemble those of a bat. They are visited by a group of red-eyed white rats in aristocratic 18th century garb who commission them to create a doll in the image of a human woman. It appears, through the reverence and care the Creatures take in this act of creation that this doll is a kind of mother earth goddess. Lovingly, they dress her, cradle her, put flowers over her painted eyes, and bring her inside to serve her cake and tea. The Creatures become drunk with religious adulation and when the rats come to exchange payment for their commissioned product, the Creatures refuse, adamant that the rats do not understand or appreciate what has been created. The rats merely wish to possess her, but the Creatures revere her. They find an egg and sew it into the doll’s abdomen with red string and hang her up above the door outside their house, one of many nauseating images that makes me think of Ari Aster’s Midsommar.

Feeling cheated, the rats come back in the night to abscond with the doll while the Creatures sleep. When the Creatures awake to find their deity gone, they are beside themselves, and set off on a quest to retrieve her. Along the way they make a surreal pitstop at the labyrinthine dwelling of the shaman of the woods—a robed, frog-headed creature who saves them when they imbibe the psychedelic fruit of his orchard and are nearly devoured by carnivorous plants. Meanwhile, the rats get drunk on blood tea and break into fist fights over a card game.  But they are shaken from their depravity by something unexpected. The lifeless doll, slumped on the floor and ignored, rustles. Out from the egg sewn inside of it emerges a delicate blue bird with a human head resembling the doll’s. It breaks out through the window and flies away, over the woods, over the heads of the Creatures, who instantly recognize it. 

Before the Creatures can bring her to safety, the bird is intercepted by a large spider with a strikingly similar human head, who weaves a web of red string. The Creatures make a mad scramble, but by the time they reach her, the fragile baby bird is gone, suffocated by red string. The creatures trade the spider a piece of the shaman’s psychedelic fruit in exchange for the precious corpse, which, once safely home, they lay respectfully to rest. The debauched rats descend into a fight over the doll which leaves her ripped into pieces, but in the end it is evident through the gentle way they cradle the tattered doll, that their avaricious desire has morphed into a sincere kind of love. The creatures let them keep her.

Weird Wednesday really lived up to its promise with this one. All 71 minutes of this gothic puppet show are without dialogue, scored by hollow wooden flutes, punctuated only by screeches and squawks. This film is a true obscurity, largely the product of Cegavske alone, who filmed it over the course of thirteen years in her apartment. She painstakingly built the set and all of the creatures and then coexisted with it, effectively living in the forest for years. It’s a  wonderfully literal instance of an artist inhabiting their work. It makes me wonder what her dinner parties were like. 

I appreciated my time in the forest, but 71 minutes was enough for me. It put me in a weird headspace. It flooded me with associations that gave me an ineffable feeling of doom. Quite disparate associations: a medieval Book of Days; the crude, worn puppets from Mr. Rogers; 1960s and 70s depictions of medieval Europe; Beatrix Potter; The Wicker Man (the original); the children’s book characters Frog and Toad; the work of Robert Eggers; Hieronymus Bosch, European animist nature deities such as the Bulgarian Kukeri. Most of these associations predate me and therefore live in my mind not as experience but as a second hand nostalgia, a peculiar nostalgia that imparts a sense of death and decay. Of things being pulled and subsumed back into the woods from which they were generated. I felt like maybe, somehow, I’d been in the woods with those creatures, somewhere, back in the recesses of abstraction and that one day I would be pulled back and the woods would wrap me in red string and consume me. Cegavske had enveloped me in nature’s death force. I needed to immediately watch something anodyne to purge myself of the feeling. 

According to Cegavske, the uneasiness is intentional. She loves her creatures, but she is definitely trying to challenge the viewer with imagery that is almost comforting but also frightening. The film, like many fairy tales, is all about dualities. How contingent they are upon one another, how they commingle, and how that makes us feel ill at ease. Intentions that are both good and evil, imagery that is simultaneously cute and ugly, a life force inextricable from death. There are countless ways dualities manifest in the film. The doll goddess with her bird child and the spider are two sides of the same coin: the creator and the destroyer. There is no inherent evil in the spider, and none of the characters regard her as such. She is a necessary force of nature. The red string encapsulates this duality in a single image. It is red string that the Creatures use to imbue their goddess with life, the same red string spun by the spider to bind and suffocate and extinguish. The mice get drunk on the blood tea of vice, but in their drunkenness they are brought to epiphany. 

Fairy tales are sparse on purpose so that myriad metaphors may be transposed upon them, but there is a feminist reading of this film as a parable of the female body that I find particularly resonant. That the female body is born of commodification, that it is the site of avarice, and of misplaced spirituality, and that these qualities are what constitute it as female. Its subjectivity and its lack of agency. The critic Andrea Long Chu talks about femaleness as an aspect defined not by physicality but by negation. That to be female is to deny oneself, to go without, so be subject to others. In Blood Tea and Red String, the female body of the deity is quite literally a product, commissioned into existence by the rats for a fee. It would seem that the Creatures, in refusing to ascribe a monetary value to her, have the more noble intent. But their worship is still an act of possession. The doll is an object, incapable of volition. She can only ever be a vessel for the desires of others. It feels significant, in this reading, that all the creatures in the forest fighting over the doll goddess code as male. 

It follows that any act of creation, negating the self in service of the formation of something else, is an inherently female act. Gestation and birth is quite a parallel process to artistic creation, and Cegavske is a creator in a more literal sense than many of her filmmaking cohort. She painstakingly built from nothing each of the little creatures in the film, clothed them and photographed them, animating them, giving them life. To wit, Cegavske seems to acknowledge this by dressing up as the doll goddess incarnate in segments which bookend the film.

Filmmaking may be an act of negation, but the process is spectacular and the product, a miracle. It is an incredibly labor intensive and time consuming art, stop motion exponentially so. As a filmmaker, I am always cognizant of the work that goes into what I am watching, but when I see something like this, the product of one person’s persistence and devotion and unwavering vision, it takes my breath away, even if it makes me a little queasy.

A final note: Christiane Cegavske has been working on a second film, Seed in the Sand, since 2008 and there is no release date as of yet, but a trailer has been released. It appears to take place in the same universe as Blood Tea and Red String and it is beautifully shot. Keep an eye out.