Alona Rodeh

Born on Moshav Ben-Ami, 1979
Lives and works in Tel Aviv and Berlin

Alona Rodeh excerpts bits of dialogue from the film Lonesome Cowboys, alongside images from the staged rape scene, and combines them with excerpts from the FBI documents. In doing so, she creates a new story centered on the figure of Viva-Ramona. The film itself, together with its deconstruction and reconstruction by Rodeh, centers on the disrupted relations between men and women, while the power of female beauty is simultaneously glorified and cast into doubt.


Viva

Born in New York, 1938

Viva is an American actress affiliated with Andy Warhol and with the circle of artists that flocked to Warhol's Factory in the late 1960s. Born Janet Susan Mary Hoffmann, Viva was given this name by Warhol. She was the person he was speaking to on the phone when he was shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968. That same year, Warhol filmed Lonesome Cowboys on a ranch in Texas, not far from the area filmed in classical Westerns. Warhol adopted the style of amateur films characterized by poor sound, improvised scripts, and amateur actors in order to tell a rather strange story about a prostitute named Ramona (played by Viva), who attempts to seduce a group of clearly homosexual cowboys. The film centers on a scene in which the cowboys attack and rape Ramona. Passersby who watched the scene being filmed believed it to be a true rape, and Warhol was subsequently questioned by the FBI on the suspicion that he was encouraging acts of indecency. The film ends with the breakup of the cowboy group and the reunion of the prostitute and her pimp, who resume their relationship as a couple.