A hybrid between Jean Cocteau and Jan Svankmajer, La Femme Qui Se Poudre (aka “The Woman Who Powders Herself”), with its Gothic expressionism and artful grotesqueries crossed with the metric precision of Kurt Kren‘s more clinical materialaktion films. This is Patrick Bokanowski‘s earliest film, an evocation of concealment and unmasking, where the mundane act of a Victorian era woman’s ritualistic application of cosmetic powder seemingly opens the window, or perhaps Pandora’s Box, into underlying human anxieties of physical beauty, youth, desirability, and objectification, reflecting the superficiality of societal notions of beauty through the alien-ness of landscape and the ephemeral riddle of true identity through epic, soul-searching journeys and faceless phantoms that emerge from thin air before vanishing from view. (Unknown + Editor @ The End of Being)