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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

# Title Artists Run Time Year Country
1 Swallow Elisabeth Subrin 00:28:07 1995 United States
2 The Fancy Elisabeth Subrin 00:35:21 2000 United States
3 Well, Well, Well Elisabeth Subrin 00:03:49 2002 United States

Swallow

Elisabeth Subrin
1995 | 00:28:07 | United States | English | Color | | 4:3 | Video

DESCRIPTION

Based on accounts of girlhood anorexia, Swallow unravels the masked and shifting symptoms that define clinical depression. With a densely layered soundtrack, humorous and painful scenes of potential psychological breakdown reveal a critical loss of meaning, and the failure to diagnose mental illness. Weaving narrative, documentary, and experimental strategies, Swallow intimately traces the awkward steps from unacknowledged depression to self-recognition.

This title is also available on Elisabeth Subrin Videoworks.

The Fancy

Elisabeth Subrin
2000 | 00:35:21 | United States | English | Color | Mono | 4:3 |

DESCRIPTION

The Fancy is a speculative, experimental work that explores the life of Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), evoked by the published catalogues of and about her photographs. Structural in form, the video radically reorganizes information from the catalogues in order to pose questions about biographical form, history and fantasy, female subjectivity, and issues of authorship and intellectual property.

“Continuing her exploration of experimental biographical forms, the maker of Swallow and Shulie turns her critical gaze to the life and art of a renowned young female photographer whose early death left behind a controversial body of work rife with psychosexual implication. Rigorously structural in form, this speculative bringing-to-light meticulously sifts physical evidence and sketchy facts in an attempt to uncover the traces of a seemingly suppressed history embedded behind the photographer’s pictures.”

—Nicole Armour, “Disappearing Acts,” Film Comment 36:6 (November/December 2000) 

This title is also available on Elisabeth Subrin Videoworks.

Well, Well, Well

Elisabeth Subrin
2002 | 00:03:49 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | Video

DESCRIPTION

An experimental video for electro-feminist-performance-artists Le Tigre, the early eighties MTV aesthetic unpacks a thoroughly current obsession: the hidden erotics of office supplies.

This title is also available on Elisabeth Subrin Videoworks.