Amidst the many terms used to define artists’ film and video, ‘personal film’ was amongst the earliest, marking the practice as entirely different from the industrial production of feature films. The works in this programme variously extend how the personal was and is also political, opposed not only to mainstream cinema, but also radically challenging institutional and ideological structures; gender, sexuality, family, the state and the individual. Including Martha Rosler, Sadie Benning, Stuart Marshall and Lis Rhodes.
Programme curated by Ian White.
Films
L'invitation Au Voyage
Germaine Dulac | France | 1927 | 33min
Taking its title from the French Symbolist Charles Baudelaire’s poem of the same name.
Semiotics Of The Kitchen
Martha Rosler | USA | 1975| 6min
In this seminal feminist video a woman stands in a kitchen picking up an implement for every letter of the alphabet, A-Z.
Light Reading
Lis Rhodes | UK | 1979 | 20min
Light Reading is a visual and aural essay on gender and perception that implicates the viewer in their act of looking.
If Every Girl Had A Diary
Sadie Benning | USA | 1990 | 9min
The young Sadie Benning made a series of surprisingly aesthetic videos using a child’s pixelvision camera, of which this is one.
Pedagogue
Neil Bartlett & Stuart Marshall | UK | 1988 | 10min
Neil Bartlett delivers a monologue to the camera as it surveys his personal effects.
Invocation Of My Demon Brother
Kenneth Anger | USA | 1969 | 12min
Through his numerous films Anger exploits and constructs a cinema of the occult.