New to DVD this week: ON TENDER HOOKS
Kate Shenton’s look at the suspension subculture debuted at the London FrightFest in 2013. Other fest appearances have included fantastic fests in Puchon, Bruges, and Ravenna, among others.
Shenton’s film, an expansion of a short of the same name that screened at Slamdance and elsewhere in 2012, explores the world of suspension, a subculture of individuals who insert hooks through their skin and are suspended on cables to work through pain, achieve ecstatic states, embrace a kinship with like-minded individuals, or to have fun with unusual body-altering experiences. For the majority of its running time, the film merely functions as a survey of the practice, interviewing various adherents with different levels of experience and various motivations for the unusual act – some who’ve been suspended countless times and are proselytizers, and others who’ve just done it once and are still reeling from the intensity of the experience. Close to the end of the film, Shenton herself becomes suspended, and has a very intense, at times painful, experience, which she doesn’t regret, but is not interested in repeating. It’s refreshing that the outsider filmmaker not only takes a non-judgmental approach to an alternative lifestyle practice that might otherwise be too easily portrayed as a freakshow, but she even participates in it, even briefly. Ultimately, however, the project suffers from a lack of a compelling through line, and, to a lesser extent, very rough production values.
what (not) to doc 