Sexuality

On a Shore Beneath the Sky

Be careful when you go out into the surf in a skimpy thong... the current can be treacherous and turbulent as is the human heart!

Obsessive

A boy endures sleepless nights of desire and obsession in this haunting visualization of erotic possession.

Nocturne

 The woman has perhaps murdered her lover and is living in an unstable world when he returns to her at night, in her dreams and into her arms, as witness to the subversive violence of nature, corporeality and desire.

With Anne Kugler, Bradley Eros and Karen Sullivan. Additional cinematography by Robert Fenz.

This title is only available on Pistolary! Films and Videos by Peggy Ahwesh.

An interactive CD-ROM inspired by the lives and work of ten famous women: Josephine Baker, Simone de Beauvoir, Catherine the Great, Colette, Marie Curie, Marlene Deitrich, Isadora Duncan, Frida Kahlo, Margaret Mead, and Gertrude Stein. The CD-ROM is an investigation into the intersecting economies of sexuality, authorship, eroticism, and gender that inform the lives of women. Their identities are configured in the negotiated space between self and other, a negotiation that continues in Tamblyn's relationship to them as narrator.

 

Me and Rubyfruit

Based on a novel by Rita Mae Brown, Me and Rubyfruit chronicles the enchantment of teenage lesbian love against a backdrop of pornographic images and phone sex ads. Benning portrays the innocence of female romance and the taboo prospect of female marriage.

This title is also available on Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 1.

Mayhem

Through a catalogue of looks, movements, and gestures, Mayhem presents a social order run amok in a libidinous retracing of film noir conventions. Sexuality flows in an atmosphere of sexual tension, danger, violence, and glamour; antagonism between the sexes is symbolized in the costuming of women in polka dots and men in stripes. Censored in Tokyo for its use of Japanese lesbian erotica, this tape creates an image bank of what signifies the sexual and the seductive in the history of imagemaking, pointing to the way we learn about our bodies, and how to use them from images.

Martina's Playhouse

“In Martina’s Playhouse everything is up for grabs. The little girl of the title oscillates from narrator to reader to performer and from the role of baby to that of mother. While the roles she adopts may be learned, they are not set, and she moves easily between them. Similarly, in filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh’s playhouse of encounters with friends, objects aren’t merely objects but shift between layers of meaning. Men are conspicuously absent, a ‘lack’ reversing the Lacanian/Freudian constructions of women as Ahwesh plays with other possibilities."

Majnounak (Crazy of You)

Set in the industrial suburbs of Beirut, Majnounak (Crazy of You) explores male sexuality through interviews with three men who are asked to recount very openly the beginning, middle, and end of a sexual relationship they have experienced. The video explores the image they wanted to project of themselves, hence the image of the "male" they identify with. Their stories are alike, starting with seduction and ending after sex.

Sex Fish

An erotic lesbian video involving swimming upstream, female power, and fish love. Made as a collaboration under the name E.T. (Ela Troyano) Baby (Jane Castle) Maniac (Cheang).

Sex Bowl

All forms of human sport become sites for sexual play and celebratory eroticism.

“The tape’s images are quick, suggestive, and sexy: fingers moving into bowling balls, shoe-smelling and toe-sucking, a dog wearing chain jewelry, fish being wrapped at the market, young naked couples having sex.... Edited like a music video, the image track is a constant flow of fetishes that lure us into the promiscuous pace of girls who keep lists of their sexual encounters.”

Scarlet Petals

Obsessive desire can leave an indelible stain on its victim.

Video artist meets a handsome and enigmatic Marlboro Man; video artist gets a sexually transmitted disease. In a wry and pointed work that’s part Ibsen and part Danielle Steele, Vanalyne Green reworks the sex-education film to take a critical look at cherished stereotypes about romance, the American West, and cowboys. Expanding on a body of work that investigates the idea that public spaces are gendered, Green revisits the myth of the rugged outdoors, and the West will never be the same.

Queen Conga

This black and white drama of romance, adventure and outer space intervention was mounted at the San Francisco Art Institute. The plot concerns two groups of missionaries who depart for a tropical island inhabited by a population of attractive denizens who are ruled by a libido-fueled queen. She in turn is guided by the Star People who have their own carnal urges and the result is volcanic. The $400 budget guarantees cheap thrills and makes an explosive vehicle for the queen of these dime store dynamos: Linda Martinez (our Sharon Stone).

Purgatory Junction

A vain, self centered mother competes with her daughter in the world of carnivorous men and sleazy movies.

Primal Scenes

Over grainy, black and white images of a woman giving birth, Montano reads the story of a nun’s sexual self-discovery—recounting Sister Joan’s growing awareness of her body’s sensuousness and sexuality. Primal Scenes is an excellent example of women’s erotica, focusing on a woman’s experience of her body as both sexually powerful and deeply mysterious.