Special thanks to Irena Fayngold and Vanessa O'Neill for helping BALAGAN to get in touch with some of the filmmakers of this program.

Program

How to be a good wife 5min, 16mm, 1997
Director: Joan Nidzyn

The piece offers a stinging commentary on sexism in mid century America. Combining found footage of bathing beauties, an archetypal fairy tale, a wistful Bobby Darin song and intentionally matter-of-fact text creates this deft satire. Joan Nidzyn lives in Boston and teaches filmmaking at Massachusetts College of Art. Joan's work deals with issues of family history, the body and female identity. Her approach to filmmaking is experimental as she tries to express herself with a language that is primarily visual. Her films have been shown across the United States and in Israel and Chile.

On becoming a Swan 3min, video, 2000
Director: Adriene Hughes

Adriene Hughes is a M.F.A. graduate candidate at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is a former dancer who works within the medium of video and sound, and has formerly exhibited ON BECOMING A SWAN at Short and Edgy, Women in Film and Video New England, and Napolidanza, Festival Il Coreografo Elettronico, in Naples, Italy.

'The major portion of my life has not been spent as a visual artist. I was a ballet dancer, and as a dancer I learned how to communicate with my body a particular set of codes and visual language. The experience of being a performer, and communicating a performative language with my body has constructed a unique notion of the self, as woman, and how I perceive that construction. Interpreting the "object" of woman as a sign has become not only a political communication, but also a transgendered issue for my investigations. In the context of visual language and meaningful form, in particular I am most intrigued with hyper-feminine roles of the ballet dancer and the codes the dancer projects. It is the mimicry of woman as image mixed with qualities of fetishness, sexuality, gender appropriation, and overtly feminine gestures which I find as iconic. To express these concepts I am using the device of video projection and sound. The strategy is to change the authority of the viewership from one of watching, to one of becoming feminized by no longer having the power to gaze freely. I choose the fetish objects which you are to view, and also creating a sound environment which alters the aural senses of this visual experience via classical references, mixed with sounds made by the body while engaged in dance. The experience of the traditional ballet is stripped and placed within a different context. The use of video and sound support the relationship of the visual and the aural as if experiencing a performance, though there is no separation between audience and performer as one would experience during a ballet in a theater. My goal is to give the viewer an insight to the mechanisms of the fetish through the use of an installation space beyond the performative stage. ' (Adriene Hughes)

Self Portrait with Crab, Rock & Eggs 4.5min, video, 1998-2000
Director: Bebe Beard

Bebe Beard received her BFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. Her video installation work has been seen recently at the Artists Foundation Gallery in South Boston and at the John Slade Ely House of Contemporary Art in New Haven, CT. A member of the Fort Point Artists Community since 1997, Beard and her husband, - painter- Dan Osterman work and live at the 249 A Street Artists' Cooperative. Prior to moving to Boston they lived in the Northeast Connecticut town of Thompson and were active in the arts community there.

Metempsychosis I: Aqui 3.5min, video, 2000
Director: Isa Dean

Isa Dean's work presents an identity constructed via a nuanced intersection of cultural and philosophical influences. Her investigation of essentialist and constructivist belief systems emerge from deeply personal experiences. Viewing Isa Dean¹s work, which shifts between the natural and the artificial; between the political and the esthetic; between the familiar and the uncanny; between the mundane and the fabulous; and between the deadpan and the humorous, becomes a metaphor for cultural identity and awareness as complex as identity itself. Isa Dean received her Master of Fine Art from Tufts University in affiliation with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1999. In 1998, she participated in the Skowhegan Summer Studio Program and, later that year, was commissioned by the Cambridge Multicultural Art Center to create the installation Where do I fit in?. Isa Dean¹s video installation, Whiter, has exhibited at the Mills, and her work will be showing at Gallery Bershad this April.

'Through ceramic sculpture, performance-video, and installation, I explore issues concerning my multi-layered identity, and discuss the construct of identity itself, the limitations it imposes and the possibilities it allows for each of us. In my investigation of social dichotomies, I seek to reconcile these opposing parts and discover a new way of being. These issues are important not only for the wealth of information and understanding I get for myself, but through interaction, diverse populations of people have the opportunity to see out of my eyes and possibly reconcile these issues for themselves. This work is vitally connected to nature. In it I seek a sense of rootedness, of an ancient and internal power source from which we all can be revitalized and gain understanding. My work acts as both the embodiment and container of this energy. This work evolves out of autobiography, social and cultural critique, and philosophical and spiritual concerns. I am creating virtual scenarios which are both universal and individual, and present multiple perspectives from which to explore issues of: racial and sexual identity, gender and social roles, the real versus the superficial, dogma and one's own path, and the relationship between the spirit and the body. I am asking people to take a journey. This imaginary landscape and situation alludes to our responsibility for how we see and perceive the world, and how each of us has the power to manifest change.' (Isa Dean)

Song of Songs 3min, video, 2000
Director: Lara Frankena

The video presents a fragmented view of a woman's mouth opening and closing. The images allude to the reversal that occurs at the altar, when a man nourishes a woman with a man's flesh. The audio is composed entirely of bible readings. Fear and desire are played out through the rituals of worship and reading. This piece is a component of an installation of sound and video exploring the relationship between text and the female congregant in the context of Christianity. The audio is situated in sculptural speakers which construct a 'sanctified' space.

Lara Frankena received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. She is an artist and an educator, and works primarily with video, sound, and photography. She is also trained in traditional hand bookbinding and letterpress printing.

Jellyfish is a video poem about jellyfish and the dual worlds created by the separation and surface of water. Levels of undo is an experimental short in which a hand peels and orange, and repeatedly writes and un-writes the words "I have no regrets". Using page peel effects, and reversing the video, this video is a metaphor for actions and inactions in our daily lives. Inspired by the relative ease in the digital world to do and undo mistakes, the realities that this piece explores are those of "what if", and peoples' desires to reverse their actions and go down another path.

"Sarah Smiley's expert, dreamlike videos combine sound with poetry and haunting images to evoke effectively the many layers of consciousness" - Cate McQuaid, Boston Globe

Levels of Undo "...is a provocative musing not just on something as mundane as peeling an orange, but on a life lived, possibly with regrets." - Holly Willis, LA Freewaves

Sarah Smiley is a media artist and educator. Her work combines the aesthetic, social, and conceptual, and has been shown in Denmark, Germany, Sweden, the Canary Islands, and throughout the United States. She is currently a member of the VideoSpace Collective in Boston, and has taught video art at Massachusetts College of Art, and Umass Boston.

Silence 13min, 16mm, 2001
Director: Vanessa O'Neill

An idea of white.

Vanessa O'Neill's films have screened at film festivals and many venues in the Boston Area. She is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and is the Associate Director of the Boston Jewish Film Festival.

The Field Far Away 8 min, video, 1999
Director: Ann Steuernagel

The Field Far Away is fashioned largely from documentaries and home movies shot in the United States just prior to the assassination of JFK. It is a comment on the Viet Nam war as much as it is a metaphor for historical and personal cycles. Ann Steuernagel is an experimental video and sound artist. Her visual work, which includes abstract portraiture and dance, accentuates the gestures and quotidian rhythms of her subjects. Ann's sound work-a blend of ambient sound, ethnographic recordings, story telling, and original music-stems from her decade-long collaboration with postmodern choreographer Caitlin Corbett. Ann has created numerous sound scores for the Caitlin Corbett Dance Company. Ann's work has been shown in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Mexico City, and at the Rencontres Internationales Hors-Circuit Festivals in Paris and Berlin. In August 1999, Ann's video boy running won first prize at the XX VideoArt Festival in Locarno, Switzerland. In April 2000, Ann received an honorable mention from the New England Film/Video Festival for her short experimental work The Field Far Away. Most recently, Ann was the winner of a 2001 Massachusetts Cultural Council Media Fellowship. http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~steuern/

My Movie 16min, video
Director: Cadence Thomases

'In My Movie, Cadence Thomases documents her own process of self-discovery as she copes with the death of her father. Through collections of video and film media, Thomases comes to terms both with her father's death and with her changing self-image. My Movie is, then, a self-conscious work that reflects upon the medium of film. "Early on" Thomases remarks, "when I was making this movie I thought, ŒWhen will this ever end?¹ and now I know: it won¹t ever end, really... I mean, this movie, it is my movie, and it is my life, I thought for a while I could separate these things, but is there any reason? Must I define my life apart from the video? And to try to separate the two was crazy, I *lived* this movie and I still do." Thomases aligns her life with her life-work, filmmaking, demonstrating her commitment to her own process of self-discovery as a filmmaker which she skillfully depicts in this personal portrait.' (Museum of Fine Arts Calendar).

My Movie has enjoyed extensive screenings including shows at The Smithsonian Institution¹s Hirshhorn Museum; Millennium Film Workshop, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Film Arts Foundation, San Francisco. Cadence Thomases, a Boston native, is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied Printmaking and Photography, ultimately obtaining her degree in the department of Film, Animation and Video. Thomases finds herself in a constant cycle of destruction and redemption. She is currently living through her second installment, collections of writings and recordings intended for radio broadcast. (http://www.providencephoenix.com/archive/movies/99/05/20/risd.html)

'Early on, when I was making this movie I thought, ŒWhen will this ever end?¹ and now I know: it won¹t ever end, really." Thomases declares about her video life, "I mean, this movie, it *is* my movie, and it *is* my life, I thought for a while I could separate these things, but is there any reason? Must I define my life apart from the video? And to try to separate the two was crazy, I *lived* this movie and I still do. Any fictions created in this process became realities. Stories or Œfictions¹ that I had taken on in the pursuit of self-exploration became my own truths. My process was: I¹d shoot, then edit; while editing I¹d take the camera and shoot some more (I mean *in* the AVID with the noise and everything,) like a sketch for the final drawing, but a lot of those sketches ended up being the content of the final. Then I¹d sleep and then shoot some more, I mean this *was* and *is* my life. During the editing process I realized I could make a million movies, I didn¹t know when to stop. So the question was which story do I tell now? Which story am I *ready* to tell. And my movie represents a pause in my process. In a way it¹s an end point, in another it¹s a beginning.' (Cadence Thomases)

Repetition Compulsion 6min, 35mm (shown on video), 1997
Director: Ellie Lee

Repetition Compulsion is an animated documentary which explores how prolonged childhood abuse in the lives of homeless women has set the stage for further victimization on the streets. Many homeless women develop intimate yet ultimately destructive relationships with homeless men for companionship and protection. Weaving dark and violent charcoal imagery with actual interviews of homeless women, the film describes the crippling feelings of worthlessness, depression, powerlessness, paranoia and terror as the women become increasingly more dependent on the homeless men who support yet continue to hurt them. Born directly out of the filmmaker's experience of working for four years with homeless women who had suffered long, unaddressed histories of physical and sexual abuse, Repetition Compulsion gives voice and vision to these women's stories of abuse and survival. However, Lee did not want to expose her subjects or exacerbate their pain. Rather than depict their struggles explicitly, Lee chose to weave their words over animated charcoal images she created. Lee explains, "Through animation, violent scenarios can be transformed into an angry flurry of charcoal lines; it allows me to depict their hardships with a universality that does not exploit the lives of the particular women upon whom this film is based."

"Making full use of animation's power to convey a nightmare, REPETITION COMPULSION burrows intimately into the world of battered women. Thoroughly deserving of the grand prize, Lee's film is more enlightening in its seven minutes than a stack of documentaries or dramas." - The Boston Globe (Source: First Run Icarus Films) (interview from newenglandfilm.com )