Gender

At the heart of Alone With You is the notion of impassioned avarice, i.e. the kind of motivated acquisitiveness that drives both erotic desire and obsessive collecting.

Shooter explores the idea of overt manliness, exposing it to be a flaccid gesture and an exercise in posturing. In the video, I assume the persona of a metal head wandering an urban landscape, making threatening yet empty gestures to passersby to create an exaggerated sense of power and machismo. I use three different songs by Motorhead, that are never allowed to get past the opening guitar riffs, to further construct a sense of masculinity that falls back onto itself. I also utilize humor to facilitate exposing the paradoxes contained within my actions.

Like a generation of viewers, I was profoundly affected by Deliverance.  But I have always been troubled by the hegemonic structures of gender proposed by Boorman and Dickey. Hence, my version is played by women: myself, Peggy Ahwesh, Jackie Goss, Su Friedrich, and Meredith Root, all experimental filmmakers who work as academics. While faithful to our respective male characters, we also play ourselves.

The title gives a bitter meaning to the uneasy image of a woman who is brushing her hair over her face with fierce movements. Mostly the face remains impersonally hidden under her hair; when it is uncovered, we see how the rough scratches of the brush against the skin have smeared her lipstick.

This title is also available on Hester Scheurwater Videoworks: Volume 1.

"If there's something big, big that you want to reach for, you begin by dreaming." —Ivonne and Ivette

"The discomfort in Sleepworld Volume 1 is that of being oneself. The videos included here look at who we are and what we imagine we are. They are experiments in appearances, about the use of artifice to improve life or hide it. It is a reflection on moral displacement, hypocrisy, self-contained dreams, self-loathing, self-destruction in order to repeatedly kill our dreams.

Until his untimely death from AIDS in 1992, Tom Rubnitz produced short, humourous videotapes featuring some of New York’s most outrageously talented musicians, artists and drag queens. Influenced by mass media entertainment, Rubnitz crafted hilarious videos which simultaneously celebrated and parodied pop culture’s bountiful energy and inventiveness. As Tom said, “I wanted to make things beautiful, funny and positive—escapes that you could just get into and laugh through. That was really important to me.

Since its original release in 1995, this comprehensive two-volume, eight-program package on the history of experimental and independent video curated by Christine Hill was available only on VHS tape. The DVD launch brings this essential tool for the understanding of the development of media arts to a whole new generation of teachers, libraries, students and researchers.