Filmmaker Julika Rudelius' Seduction Into Discomfort

It Is True Because I Feel It (2021), Rites of Passage (2008) and Your Blood Is as Red as Mine (2004)

“Art is seduction. For me, I like to seduce people into feeling uncomfortable,” German-born video artist Julika remarked at the Q&A after the screening of her three shorts shown at IMPAKT Festival 2024 – It Is True Because I Feel It (2021), Rites of Passage (2008) and Your Blood Is as Red as Mine (2004). Indeed, one should not expect a detached, scholarly point of view as one may anticipate when in the role of an audience. The three shorts circle gender, power, interpersonal relations and human vulnerabilities within late capitalism. You are not spared from confrontation, and you shouldn’t be. 

All three shorts invited me into a wave of emotions – peaks of tension arise within my guts and sour around my glands but eventually married by an unresolved travelling to the next question. The discomfort seems to be precisely the point of Julika’s practice. At the Q&A, a member of the audience – a white, male, middle-class – described It Is True Because I Feel It (2021) as the most uncomfortable screening moment for him as “It’s so embarrassing. It’s so hippie.” To which Julika replied, “Maybe it’s the closest in race, class, and gender to you.” 

This sharp take is not only a vantage point she poses to the audience, but also to herself. Besides citing her own story of being confronted with her race, class, and gender when she moved to Bijlmer as a white blonde woman, Julika is not afraid to present her confrontations on the screen for dissection. In Your Blood Is as Red as Mine (2004), one of the scenes pans to a group of children playing around the street corner, before a male voice chimes in, questioning her, “Do you know the name of any of these kids?” He asserts his concern that she has the power can put that footage anywhere and frame it in any way. 

I was not exempted from such confrontations of power. Do I truly understand others’ perspectives, or is it only my perception? What can I do in response to others’ expressions of power? These questions were raised within and simultaneously the challenges of the participants on-screen in It Is True Because I Feel It (2021). The short film featured overlaid audios of verbal exchanges between heterosexual pairs filling the space as the camera shifts from one angle of an observant to another. 

The audience observes the energetic exchanges of tantra healing rituals as a bystander, an interesting position to take as many interactions were borne out of conflict, taking the forms of raw screaming and wailing of unfiltered desires, violence, and hatred. Themes such as patriarchy, kinks, and trauma interweave throughout the participants’ intimate stories.

I found myself sharing the sadness of the female participants’ words, then, an immediate shame of feeling sadness: why do males react to pain with anger and females with sadness? Can I not allow myself to feel anger? Yet, no matter how much I fixated my attention, I could not understand the men’s feelings. How can one be speaking of his desire to dominate the woman in front of him as a sexual object while she is expressing her wish to be seen and heard? What is the worth of holding onto pride and summarising hours of conversation with “I forgive you for the use of perpetrator/victims strategy you use to manoeuvre me however you want”?

I found no answer to how I can understand such perspectives. Not all the conversations in the film lead to a resolution, but perhaps that is not the point of conversing. Like the dynamic between the audience and the film, it is by staying with friction and discomfort that we choose curiosity and openness instead of escape and indifference. 

A comprehensive review on the IMPAKT festival can be read on Arts Talk Magazine.