Cecelia Condit Videoworks: Volume 1

"Relating a tale told by a girl on a swing, Beneath the Skin explores the contrast between the impersonal horror of a news story heard on television and the involvement of the storyteller in a nightmare, which gradually becomes more familiar and commonplace as the tale unfolds. The straightforward approach of the teller is humorously or frighteningly contrasted by a bombardment of visual images which mock or intensify the macabre flavor of the work."

—Cecelia Condit

This title is also available on Cecelia Condit Videoworks: Volume 1.

Possibly In Michigan is an operatic fairytale about cannibalism in Middle America. A masked man stalks a woman through a shopping mall and follows her home. In the end, their roles are reversed when the heroine deposits a mysterious Hefty bag at the curb. Like Condit's other video narratives, Possibly In Michigan shows bizarre events disrupting mundane lives. Combining the commonplace with the macabre, humor with the absurd, she constructs a world of divided reality.

"Putting on femininity with a visual and narrative vengeance; Condit's disconcerting irony and sweetly gruesome stories also 'put-on' and undo societal prescriptions and taboos regarding women's options to subjugation by violence or the gaze, letting us see and hear what often remains hidden, behaving with impropriety."

—Patricia Mellencamp, “Uncanny Feminism: The Exquisite Corpses of Cecelia Condit,” Afterimage 14 (September 1986)

This title is also available on Cecelia Condit Videoworks: Volume 1.

Invoking a biblical story of life coming from dry bones, Condit constructs an experimental narrative about an older woman’s confrontation with her own mortality after the death of her mother. The bone represents the promise of youth and hope—a promise jealously coveted by the young, but needed more by those grown old. Inverting cultural values, Condit represents feminine youth as a mannequin, and seeks humanity in the form of the older woman, who is reborn by overcoming her fear of death.

This title is also available on Cecelia Condit Videoworks: Volume 1.

In Oh, Rapunzel, when Rapunzel flees the tower, Condit's mother leaves her home for an independent living facility and a freedom that she has never known. A collaboration between Cecelia Condit and Dick Blau. Music by Stephen Vogel. Re-edited in 2008.

This title is also available on Cecelia Condit Videoworks: Volume 1.