Everything Shines in the Darkness: Sheldon & Diane Rochlin’s Vali, the Witch of Positano
Art & Trash, episode 5
Everything Shines in the Darkness: Sheldon & Diane Rochlin’s Vali, The Witch of Positano
Stephen Broomer, March 4, 2021
Vali: The Witch of Positano is an intimate portrait of Vali Myers, an Australian bohemian who had become known as a modern day mystic in the intellectual circles of La Rive Gauche in Paris, and who by the time the documentary was shot in 1965/66, was living in the wilderness near Positano, a provincial town in Italy, with her husband, Rudi Rappold, spending her days in bucolic meadows, communing with spirits and roving the countryside with packs of farm animals and wild foxes. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer positions the film within the context of the Living Theatre, with which filmmakers Sheldon & Diane Rochlin were associated, and addresses Myers’ embodiment of bohemian self-invention and the utopian overtones of her life in Italy.
Vali: The Witch of Positano was released by Mystic Fire Video on VHS in 1989. That release is the edition from which this video essay was made. It is presently available on DVD for purchase directly from Flame Schon (formerly Diane Rochlin), who can be reached at flame.schon@gmail.com.
SCRIPT:
In 1967, filmmakers Sheldon and Diane Rochlin released Vali: The Witch of Positano, an intimate portrait of Vali Myers, an Australian bohemian who had become known as a modern day mystic in the intellectual circles of La Rive Gauche in Paris. When the Rochlins began studying Myers, she was living in rural Italy with her husband, Rudi Rappold, spending her days in bucolic meadows, communing with spirits and roving the countryside with packs of farm animals and wild foxes. The Rochlins were already deeply involved with visionary movements in the arts; Sheldon Rochlin had been close with the Living Theatre and would later make two documentaries about their activities, Performance Now and Signals Through the Flames; Diane Rochlin would later become known as Flame Schon, and under that name developed a formidable body of work as a film and video artist, integrating performance with psychedelic abstraction. Vali Myers presented the Rochlins with an external actor that embodied the mystical traits and techniques of performance art and who offered herself wholly with the candor of a prophet. The resulting film is both a documental treatment of Myers and an impression of her experience and perspective. Its understanding of difference and eccentricity betray a utopian sensibility, mirrored in Myers’ own communard lifestyle. The credit of directing the film goes to Sheldon Rochlin in collaboration with Diane Rochlin, Myers and Rappold.
Vali was made during an episode of Myers’ life when she had abandoned the bohemian culture of Paris to live in Positano, Italy in a house teeming with wildlife, sharing meals with donkeys. As the film begins, she speaks on the soundtrack about her desire to escape to an environment of pure, primal being. Myers and Rappold have embraced Thoreau’s ideal of lone communion with nature. While Myers has occult and mystical overtones to her philosophical and ritualized behaviours, their lifestyle is in step with the austerity and purity of the Back to the Land movement.
Myers’ physical appearance was strikingly nonconformist when she first appeared in Paris, and long takes are spent with her meticulously applying makeup, and tattooing the faces of friends with curvilinear veve-like symbols. Scenes of street life in Positano show a stark contrast to Myers’ freespirited, eccentric activities; while she dances with abandon in the wilderness, as if in a trance, couples of conventional post-Miracle dignity walk along the boardwalk in a nearby town. Everywhere she goes, Myers seems to be accompanied by animals, a latter day Saint Francis, and as she forages, she recalls her native Australia as a land of magical visions. Her faith is both esoteric and defiant: she delights in the fear she strikes in nuns and priests.
Myers talks about her lifestyle in contrast to those of the dominant culture. The film’s celebratory indulgence of Myers’ whimsy and eccentricity must have been in keeping with the Rochlins’ experience of the Living Theatre, as she often appears as a post-modern, performative construct, an invention, more mask than face. She seems at once to occupy the orientalist mysteries of the occult, the advent of hippie style, and the invention of celebrity in a post-Warhol era. Myers and Rappold visit the town and are crowded and fawned over as celebrities. This suggests not only superficial ‘style’ celebrity, but also, the warmth and embrace that they’ve found for their vivid eccentricity in provincial, superstitious Europe. Myers performs tirelessly, in her improvised dances, seamlessly tripping between fantasy and reality, her face a mask of makeup and mugging and stares, as she whispers to her animals in chirps and squeaks and recites incantations as if speaking in tongues. The filmmakers find Myers in her element in the caves and fields of Positano, where she appears to be spontaneously developing her own primitive language. In her affection for wild beasts, she erases the traditional boundaries of her own humanity, finding a new place not as master to the beast but as a being of flowing energy among other such beings.
“It would be at home in the New American Cinema ... where Myers could belong not as an eccentric style icon but as a poet and oracle.”
Sheldon Rochlin’s photography is both observational and lyrical, often combining medium and long shots on figures with closer and more abstract compositions. Consider this scene, in which Myers and Rappold dance and embrace on their bed in the woods, where shots that establish the figures and environment are intercut with closeups from Rappold’s perspective and later, a medley of superimposed images of the two dancing. These scenes more closely implicate Vali: The Witch of Positano as a work of the New American Cinema, distancing it from the observational, cinema verité approach to portraiture present elsewhere in the film, bringing it closer to the personal filmmaking of Jonas Mekas and the New York underground. It would be at home in that cinema, where members of that movement gave great credence to claims of mystical intuition, and where Myers could belong not as an eccentric style icon but as a poet and oracle.
Myers keeps a collage sketchbook and diary, which she calls the black book because, as she says, “everything shines in the darkness.” She melds everyday observations with allusions to witchcraft, prescriptive lists of ingredients, the reading of tea leaves, and her ideas for spells, which seem conceived to shock polite culture. Myers’ rituals are photographed by Sheldon Rochlin in ways that take advantage of cinema’s own mysterious, magical qualities, employing the camera’s potential for compositional abstraction. During a sequence in which Myers puts herself into a trance, the stages of her ritual are enhanced by the atmosphere, by Rochlin’s compositional artifice and a crackling fire. There is an atmosphere to Vali that makes it feel in keeping with both the underground, avant-garde movie and the slow-burn supernatural drama, And Diane Rochlin’s editing strongly implies dream and fantasy rather than factual portraiture documentary. Consider this scene in which Myers enters a trance, which fades into a scene of Myers on horseback being led through the cliffs of Positano, ending with her ringing a church bell, seemingly in the throes of ecstasy.
Myers’ dollmaking workshop seems as naturally macabre in its chance arrangement as the more precise and ordered forms of nature found in the surrounding area. The film finds strength in its later passages in the contrast between their mystical, internal world and the orderly, consensus reality of the external world. when Myers and Rappold appear at an otherwise square party that appears to be a traditional family gathering. Their behaviour doesn’t seem scandalous at all to those around them, in spite of how vivid, aggressive, and sexual their dancing is; it is as if a go-go club has manifested in the midst of an orthodox family parlour. Those surrounding them watch with staid, restrained expressions, some smiling with curiosity, some smiling politely.
Myers seems to exist between a world of her own invention and a world that is surprisingly accepting and patient with her unconventional character. She speaks candidly, even melodramatically, about despair, suicide, and all of the things in society that threaten her with a kind of soul-murder; but her outlook and that of the film is ultimately utopian, that her charmed life seems to have been made possible through the world’s willingness to appreciate self-invention. At times Myers speaks about the lack of tolerance that she encounters in the world; her solution, it seems, is to have invented her own insular world in which she is able to dramatize and perform her curious inquiries into energy, poetry, and the soul.
