Elisabeth Subrin Videoworks

Video Data Bank is proud to present a compilation of celebrated titles by the artist Elisabeth Subrin, featuring four award-winning video works: Swallow (1995), Shulie (1997), The Fancy (2000), and Well, Well, Well (2002), each of which engage conventions of documentary and experimental narrative. Available together for the first time, these conceptual projects work strategically to undermine their own forms, shifting historical periods, genres and identifications to explore the nature of psychological "disorder," the residual impact of feminism and the hazy boundaries between fiction and non-fiction.

In the end, Subrin’s films and videos always return to the sober realization that there are innumerable obstacles to any attempt at understanding ourselves and our place in the world. Her efforts to express the fluidity of truth are vital in an age when new methods of recording experiences and information abound. All too aware of how flawed approaches taint memory, Subrin invents new procedures for chronicling history.

— Nicole Armour, Film Comment, November 2000