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Lyn Blumenthal Videoworks: Volume 1

The two Social Studies videos call into question fundamental assumptions about the cross-purposes of entertainment: to entertain, to present cultural values, to mediate public policies, and to define social relationships.

# Title Artists Run Time Year Country
1 Social Studies, Part I: Horizontes Lyn Blumenthal 00:20:00 1983 United States
2 Social Studies, Part II: The Academy Lyn Blumenthal 00:18:00 1983 United States

Social Studies, Part I: Horizontes

Lyn Blumenthal
1983 | 00:20:00 | United States | English | Color | | 4:3 | Video

DESCRIPTION

Horizontes incorporates scenes from a popular Cuban soap opera with running commentary in the form of a propagandistic advertising text. Blumenthal examines media programming as presenting, through the filter of a generalized moralism, a reconstructed history that mirrors the values of the dominant class. The media both "collects and corrects public memory."

Available in Spanish and English.

This title is also available on Lyn Blumenthal Videoworks: Volume 1.

Social Studies, Part II: The Academy

Lyn Blumenthal
1983 | 00:18:00 | United States | English | Color | | |

DESCRIPTION

The "dazzling, delightful, and delicious" messages of broadcast television get scrutinzed in Social Studies, Part II: The Academy. Stripped of its glitzy animation and played out against the frozen backdrop of a single spectacular image, the standard Academy Award Ceremony fare of introductions, applause, film-clips, commentary, self promotion, and professional banter shifts the banal mise-en-scene into proto-fascist theater.

This title is also available on Lyn Blumenthal Videoworks: Volume 1.