The Central Character
In her kitchen, a woman makes moves to cook dinner but is chased outside by potato vines and devolves into a nonentity. Inspired by John Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The Central Character was included in a program of Canadian experimental films for the Edinburgh Film Festival and invited to the prestigious week-long Grierson Seminar. It was
the subject of the keynote address at the Film Studies Association of Canada annual conference, and was chosen for inclusion in the Backbone: Vancouver Experimental Cinema program which toured cinématheques, festivals and repertory cinemas throughout North America.
Experimental short, 16 min. Writer, Director, Editor. Featuring Isobel Harry. Edinburgh Film Festival 1978; British Film Institute Festival; Toronto Festival of Festivals; OKanada Exhibit, Berlin; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Canadian Images; Grierson Seminar; ECIAD; Keynote lecture, Film Studies Association of Canada annual conference2011; VanCity Cinema.
The Central Character is a fifteen-minute experimental narrative that follows a woman from her orderly, pristine kitchen, into her over-grown garden, and finally into a forest space full of discarded junk, where she dissolves entirely as an autonomous subject, merging into her surrounding visually and on the soundtrack….[It] positions nature and disorder against language and its attendant desire for rationality and control. The Central Character's purposeful undoing of the main character's self-articulation paired with a critique of dominant social scripts around nature and culture are themes also found in Gruben's films of the 1980s and 1990s
– Shana MacDonald, Canadian Journal of Film Studies
Patricia Gruben’s experimental film The Central Character (1977) works with an aspect of housekeeping that I have not had occasion to mention until now: its symbolic function in maintaining the liminal social space of the home. As a cultural border or boundary, the home constitutes a margin between culture and its traditional other, the natural world…. Like the home, women are neither nature nor culture; their liminal functions make both them and their work invisible. The Central Character literalizes and demonstrates these paradoxes.
– Kathleen McHugh, Professor of English, UCLA.
Writing About the Central Character:
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Haynes, Scott, "Interview with Patricia Gruben," MOS Cineworks 10/11: Summer/Fall 1984.
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MacDonald, Shana, "Modes of Intersubjective Address in Our Marilyn and The Central Character," Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 2016 Vol.25 (1) pp. 111-134.
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McHugh, Kathleen Anne. "The Metaphysics of Housework: Patricia Gruben's The Central Character," in Andrew Ballantyne, ed. What Is Architecture. London: Routledge, 2001.
