Asparagus

Asparagus is a 1979 American experimental animated short film written and directed by Suzan Pitt. Featuring music composed by Richard Teitelbaum, the film was produced over the course of four years, while Pitt was in residence at Harvard University and in Berlin, Germany. The animated portions of the film were accomplished through the use of hand-painted cels; a physical model set and puppetry are also utilized. Asparagus premiered in January 1979 at the Whitney Museum in New York City, where it screened for two weeks. It was also shown alongside the 1977 feature film Eraserhead for nearly two years, during the latter's run of midnight screenings in New York and Los Angeles. Asparagus has been characterized as a surrealist work, and has been analyzed for its exploration of identity, gender, sexuality, and the human psyche through a feminist lens. Synopsis A serpent is seen slithering down a woman's leg. A woman then defecates two stalks of asparagus into a toilet. In another room, she opens red drapes to reveal two large windows. She watches a garden of unusual plants pass by the windows and sees a giant figure that grasps at an asparagus stalk in the ground before vanishing. The woman touches a dollhouse on a desk next to a lamp. The dollhouse is made up of four quadrants, each of which contains a miniature room. Recursively, one of the miniature rooms is the room that the dollhouse and the woman themselves are in. She plucks a chair from the miniature room, and the chair transforms into a collection of asparagus stalks and back again. The woman puts on a mask. She holds open a handbag, into which various shapes and objects float. She then heads outside into the night with the suitcase, walking past several shops along the city streets—whose windows display dildos, firearms, baby dolls, and cigarettes—and stops at a theater. Inside the theater, an audience watches the stage curtains rise to reveal theatrical scenery of a waterfall and seascape. The woman enters the house of the theater, and the stage scenery changes to a swirling vortex. She goes backstage and opens her suitcase, allowing the shapes and objects within to float out into the rest of the theater and over the audience. She then leaves in a taxi cab as some of the shapes and objects spill out into an alley, and pulls down her mask to reveal that she has no eyes or nose.