Daria Martin

Daria Martin’s latest film, A Hunger Artist, HD film, (2017) adapts Franz Kafka’s 1922 modernist short story of the same name: a strange allegory about spectacle, spectators, power and narcissism.

The phenomenon of hunger artists, which appeared from the 18th to the early 20th century, became a form of entertainment to receptive audiences at sideshows, fairs and circuses. Fasting for up to 40 days their deteriorated bodies became objects of macabre fascination.

The hunger artist central to Martin’s adaptation, played by Hayley Carmichael, fasts for years to wide adulation until his craft goes out of style. Upon leaving his long-term impresario and joining the circus, he performs for unappreciative and doubtful spectators, creating the neglect that leads to his eventual death.

The film highlights the contradictory human experience of our bodies as both ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’. Martin has previously mined film’s capacities to communicate subjective states, as well as to clinically frame objects. A Hunger Artist continues her explorations regarding states of being – levels of consciousness, the internal and the external in both body and mind.