Media Analysis

With a combination of Hollywood, European, and Israeli film; documentary; news coverage; and excerpts of 'live' footage shot in the West Bank and Gaza strip, Muqaddimah Li-Nihayat Jidal (Introduction to the End of an Argument) critiques representations of the Middle East, Arab culture, and the Palestinian people produced by the West. The video mimics the dominant media's forms of representation, subverting its methodology and construction.

"Four days spent in a studio working on a centerfold photo for Playboy magazine provided the subject matter for my film. The magazine itself deals with culture, cars, a certain lifestyle. Maybe all those trappings are only there to cover up the naked woman. Maybe it's like with a paper-doll. The naked woman in the middle is a sun around which a system revolves: of culture, of business, of living!

Take a joyride through comfortable suburbia—a landscape molded by seductive television and corporate America (and keep in mind: disaster is another logo for your consumption...). This is the age of the "culture jammed" consumer preened with Friends hair, Survivor courage, and CNN awareness. A generation emptying their wallets for the most important corporate product of all: lifestyle. The psychological road trip across a slightly battered America travels at One Mile per Minute.

A combination of experimental and narrative approaches which explore the commodification of rebellion as it is marketed to youth culture, through the eyes of two drug-dealing, teenage girls from Brooklyn who "accidentally" kill and mutilate their favorite alternative rock star. Their obsession with murders and makeovers and their confusion between fashion and transgression lead these girls into a world where nihilism is bought and sold, and rebellion is impossible.

Segalove gives us another series of true incidents involving the powerful influence of television on life, relationships, and attitudes. Among them is the tale of a family in serious dialogue about their decision to censor the tube. After purchasing the “hard-core porno” channel with their cable service, the parents discuss possible rules for their daughter’s television viewing.

Functioning as both a fake documentary and a fake advertisement, Meet the People deals with issues of desire, complicity, and identity in the age of mass media, as 14 “characters” talk about their lives, desires, and dreams.

A series of three videotape fragments (Fuse, Timer, Slow Down) presented as visual commentaries on television ads, these pieces are critical responses to the visual speed, narrative style, and format used in the making and delivering of the moving images. People producing images have been forced (for personal and public reasons) to speed up timing—time is money. This is how society builds its own schemes, structures, and culture, and how it represents them; we are consuming images as we consume food, gas, and ideas.