Horse Opera: a mystifying combination of equine scatology and fictocriticism

• Reviewed from the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival

The latest film by multi-hyphenate Moyra Davey draws on the New York-based creator’s longstanding interests and combined practice of writing, film, criticism, photography, visual art and cultural history. Horse Opera, its title nodding to the Western genre, deploys the classic avant-garde tactic of the radical sound/image split, synonymous with the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker. For the first half of the film, the images are collaged mainly from footage of horses, mostly female, in their natural habitat – tails a-wagging, flies buzzing around their faces – with a particular fixation on their butt-crack and genitalia, especially when those genitals are in the process of emitting urine. The soundtrack is centred around a recitation, by the artist, of a work of fictocriticism focusing on the exploits of a character called L, probably a stand-in for Davey herself (a presumption made in part based on themes and events referred to in Davey’s earlier critical and nonfiction writings). As footage of the recording of this spoken narrative – showing Davey pacing back and forth in her living room with headphones on, gripping her mobile phone – makes clear halfway through the film, its deliberately stilted delivery was rooted in her decision to recite it while listening to a pre-recorded version of the text; why this decision was made is less clear, as it doesn’t seem to add anything on the level of form or texture to the overall film.

L’s two primary activities appear to be reading – in particular, a passionate exegesis of Hilton Als’s recent work – and going out to parties where she takes various drugs. Onscreen, the images start to vary: the camera might follow the movements of a lizard or a snake rather than the dilations of a horse vulva; or an empty interior, presumably the place where Davey was conducting her audio recordings; or her bookshelf, her record collection, or a dog walking through the snow. These images detachedly accompany the narrative of L: reading about Charles Olson’s projective verse while she waits in a doctor’s office; shitting her pants on the way to a club after insufflating a line of coke; reminiscing about David Mancuso’s loft parties…

This premise keeps our interest for perhaps three-quarters of the film, allowing us to sink into the fabric of the piece and be compelled by the freshness of the sound/image split. But after being subjected to the umpteenth close-up of piss spewing out of a horse’s vagina, I found myself wondering what it all means. The problem, I think, falls on the side of the audial narrative, and specifically with the limits of autofiction, the register in which Davey is working here. As with literary autofiction, material that starts off compellingly can easily turn tediously self-indulgent, especially when diaristic reflections refuse to coalesce into either some kind of narrative arc or a set of meanings. Perhaps if these meandering pseudo-fictional reflections had been supported by a more thorough and profound consideration of the sound/image disjunction, Horse Opera might have been of greater interest to cinephiles rather than simply zoophiles.