22 - Amy Taubin's Bag

Summary

In the Bag (1981) is the first completed film of Amy Taubin, noted avant-garde critic, actress and performance artist. Roughly twenty minutes long, the film records a search through a tattered, patchwork-quilt shoulder bag for something – we know not what. Like Wavelength, a film many misremember as a single tracking shot, In the Bag is also easily misremembered and wrongly described as a stationary long take à la Warhol which relentlessly records Taubin's relentless rummaging. However, in fact, the film is intensively edited – full of what we come to understand as flash forwards, and cross-cuts between the primary search, set on a brown table, and an almost identical search, set on and amid the blue sheets of a bed. Taubin – her “cold/preoccupied” shoulder to the camera, her face generally occluded from us by her long brown hair – is the only person in the film; her manner is concentrated, suggesting a total obliviousness to onlookers. This plus her silence and the methodical character of her search gives In the Bag a meditative air which, in turn, places the film on a continuum with Taubin's solitary performance pieces – all solo meditations on the nature of the self.

Taubin began making theater pieces in 1978. These include Pimping for Herself (1975), Double Occupancy (1976), and Performance Which Began with a Train Ride on Which the Rider Realized but Not Until the Last Moment That She Had Been Seated Backward, Or Half of an Unbalanced Situation (1978).