Program:
WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE (dir. Mary Filippo, 1987, 10 min.)
“In WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE I talk about wanting to be a hero and show myself passive and inactive. I've used cigarette smoking and the "heroes" presented in cigarette commercials to suggest that advertising has transformed my desire to act heroically into cigarette consumption. That this particular consumption is self destructive and addictive is important since I want to suggest a link between self destructive behavior and my inability to "be a hero." The film is a collage of my own footage, "found" cigarette commercials and images filmed from television.” - Mary Filippo
DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR (dir. Nina Fonoroff, 1986, 8.5min)
I had been thinking about the nature of "echo," as both an acoustical and visual phenomenon. I had hoped to defamiliarize material which seemed to adhere to the demand for wholeness. My aim was not to "represent" or "express" a particular state of mind or emotion, but to endeavor to generate a set of possibilities for new connections between sensory experience and the experience of meaning.” - Nina Fonoroff
THE ACCURSED MAZURKA (dir. Nina Fonoroff, 1994, 40 min.)
Obsessive journal entries, clinical reports, varied sources of music, and a series of watercolors depicting a pierced and bleeding brain are among the many elements that make up a narrative around the occasion of mental breakdown. Instruments of electrical transmission are metaphors for the diseased brain, as reconstructed by a woman who has lost her reason, her body, and her foothold in personal identity. The unseen protagonist at first attributes her illness to repeated hearings of a Chopin mazurka on the radio. Radio static, a telephone switchboard gone awry, a woman imagistically redoubled playing the accordion become points of departure for a rant situated in the remembrance of a mental state so extreme as to make impossible any attempt at representation. Like an overwound mechanism, her account is eclipsed by images and sound that derail the story's trajectory. The reports of a series of practitioners on the patient's symptoms and "progress" reveal the ineffectuality of conventional mental health treatment while the patient offers hyperbolic excesses in describing her experience. On the road to recovery, she searches for possible causes for the lapse of sanity. Her provisional understanding makes reference to a 1963 home movie of her family dancing on the lawn of their house: "It is not for me to ransack scenes of the past for clues or explanations ... so, let these people dance in place ... they have done nothing wrong ... there is no culpability to be found among these shadows."
Total Run Time: 58.5 minutes
