Jan Clausen: The Company of Cannibals

The Company of Cannibals follows the intertwined stories of three women who are obsessed with the fate of the earth. Paula Schweike is a Bay Area poet turned secular mystic. Abandoning her writing career to give public performances in which she burns her journals, she unexpectedly acquires a following of fervent young disciples. They face a terrible choice when their leader, distraught at the seemingly terminal condition of the planet, ends her own life after requesting that her supporters ritually consume her remains to honor the ideal of “a world feeding on itself.” Lizzie Tollefsen, Paula’s right-hand woman, is a very young revolutionary genius who has given up on securing justice in her lifetime and aims only to destroy, by any means necessary, a “cannibalistic” world order based on runaway consumption. Sonja Li, a filmmaker and for a time Lizzie’s lover, enters Paula’s orbit with the determination to make a documentary about the journal burner, only to discover that the object of her interest abhors all forms of mechanical and electronic reproduction. Told partly from the distant perspective of a far future time in which the Universal Crash precipitated by the Paula cult is but a chilling memory, and partly from the very close perspective of participants in the drama, The Company of Cannibals both parodies and mourns the history we are actually living.