Paper short abstract:

Based upon shared anthropological principles, Mirror Mirror is a film about gender, performance and the desire to know. Ostensibly it documents four cabaret performers and the promoter of London’s newest queer night Club Wotever. Using feedback (what Jean Rouch called ‘l’audio-visuel contre-donne’) as the film’s ethical and structural principle Moffat wove herself into the fabric of the club and this film. She used herself, the camera, and projector to provoke and capture non-essentialist understandings of identity. The film you see is founded upon dialogue, risk and engagement, critical components of the contemporary radical queer culture under study. 58' film

Paper long abstract:

Mirror Mirror is half of Moffat's practice-led PhD thesis in visual anthropolgy. The thesis's main provocations are her personal understandings of queer, her dis-ease with fly-on-the-wall documentaries, and ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch's call for the academic to come down from the ivory tower and, using projector and camera, reciprocate his subjects' gifts of knowledge. she applied Rouch's vision to London's contemporary queer site Club Wotever, an equally hospitable place that likewise values dialogue, creativity and exchange over and above absolute definitions of self and other.

58' film