Sadie Benning uses autobiography to express personal and sexual experiences through documentary film. Her films portray the story of a lesbian teenager coming to terms with her own sexual identity. Benning subverts the consumer cultures' image of heterosexuality in number of ways. For instance, in her film Jollies, she plays with two nude female barbie dolls. Diagetic rock music blasts in the background while Benning moves the dolls into various sexual positions. She narrates, "Like most people, I have a crush." Here she asserts lesbian identity onto Barbie dolls, iconic symbols of dominant culture and heterosexuality. The rock music also contrasts with the giddy pop music associated with Barbie's image. Her use of diary provides for a personal narrative that aligns her contemplations with the many other teens that choose to record their thoughts through its form. Her films are, in a sense, an extension of her own diares. Shots of her diary excerpts drive the narrative, perhaps accounting for the inner thoughts she might not have been able to describe through another form. (ie. she uses the diary form to speak of her first sexual experience)
You can check out some of her films on youtube. She made them with a Fisherprice Pixel Vision camera that her filmmaker Dad gave her. I would definitely check her out if interested in autobiographical or portrait docs.
2 comments:
If anyone is interested in experimenting with Pixel Vision technology, talk to me. E. Spiro
I got a chance to check out Sadie's work as well. She makes short documentaries that are deeply personal and incorporate a broad mix of pop culture. A Place Called Lovely is a string of antidotes with the first focusing on a boy who would torment her until one day she fights back. Sadie uses her body as a landscape to assist in her words as she films her hair and her lips in close detail. Many times she will move away from her verbal storytelling aspects to let music channel her emotions. In one interesting shot, Sadie films scenes from The Bad Seed while playing Prince's I Wanna Be Your Lover in the background. I like the way she uses simple objects such as images from her TV, toy cars, yearbooks, and magazines to help tell her stories.
Girlpower was my favorite out of the three shorts that I watched. In this piece, Sadie tells of her isolation in school and the loneliness that she feels as a young gay teen. Once again, she uses a lot of archival footage, everything from Natzis to the Queen of England is shown. She also describes her need to thrive within her imagination and one can quite literally see this through the creativity and passion that she puts into the stories that she tells and the images that convey her ideas. She is not concerned with big budget or superior quality, the shorts were filmed using a Fisher-Price camera. The important thing here is that the audience relates to Sadie and is able to be drawn into her world through her images and words.
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