Girl Power | |
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Directed by | Sadie Benning |
Release date |
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Running time | 15 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Girl Power is a queer feminist video made in 1992 by Sadie Benning with a Fisher-Price PixelVision camera. [1] The video, which runs for 15 minutes, is considered at once a reflection on Benning's unhappy childhood and a celebration of her sexuality and the Riot grrrl subculture. [2] The video was featured in "Pixel This Vision", a project organized by The Balagan Experimental Film & Video Series to "put together a program of the best of PixelVision" [3]
The video is composed of home video footage featuring Benning as a young child, shots of notable pop culture figures (Blondie, Matt Dillon), scenes of theft captured by security cameras, cropped text from riot grrrl zines, grainy clips of explosive war sites, segments from famous films and television, "a homophobic diatribe delivered by American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell", [2] and alarming alerts such as "violent youth fierce and furious!" and "get ready for the shock of your life". [4] Benning supplements this collage of taped footage with a compilation of audio: Bikini Kill songs, the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight", dialogue from television commercials, and her own voice over and first-person narrative. [2]
While Benning's videos have often been called "coming-out" narratives and are mostly screened at gay and lesbian festivals, Girl Power has been recognized for its formulation of the adolescent girl as a "gendered sign of cultural reorientation". [5] [6] The emergence of the female child as a subject of feminist discourse, as demonstrated in Benning's work, is considered a major outgrowth of 1990s cultural phenomena, and appears in everything from scholar Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex to the music of pop icons, the Spice Girls.
Queercore is a cultural/social movement that began in the mid-1980s as an offshoot of the punk subculture and a music genre that comes from punk rock. It is distinguished by its discontent with society in general, and specifically society's disapproval of the LGBT community. Queercore expresses itself in a DIY style through magazines, music, writing and film.
Kathleen Hanna is an American singer, musician and pioneer of the feminist punk riot grrrl movement, and punk zine writer. In the early-to-mid-1990s, she was the lead singer of feminist punk band Bikini Kill, and then fronted the electropunk band Le Tigre in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Since 2010, she has recorded as the Julie Ruin.
The PXL2000, or Pixelvision, was a toy black and white video camera, introduced by Fisher-Price in 1987 at the International Toy Fair in Manhattan, which could record sound and images onto Compact Cassette tapes. It was on the market for one year with about 400,000 units produced. After that one year, it was pulled by the market, but rediscovered in the 1990s by low-budget filmmakers who appreciated the grainy, shimmering, monochrome produced by the unit, and the way in which its lens allowed the user to photograph a subject an eighth of an inch away from the camera, and pull back to a long shot without manipulating a dial, while keeping as the background and the foreground in focus. It is also appreciated by collectors, artists, and media historians, and has been used in major films and spawned dedicated film festivals.
Sadie T. Benning is an American artist, who has worked primarily in video, painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and sound. Benning creates experimental films and explores a variety of themes including surveillance, gender, ambiguity, transgression, play, intimacy, and identity. They became a known artist as a teenager, with their short films made with a PixelVision camera that have been described as "video diaries".
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Lucy Thane is a British documentary filmmaker, event producer and performer, living in Folkestone. Her films include It Changed My Life: Bikini Kill in the UK (1993) and She's Real (1997).
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Feminism has affected culture in many ways, and has famously been theorized in relation to culture by Angela McRobbie, Laura Mulvey and others. Timothy Laurie and Jessica Kean have argued that "one of [feminism's] most important innovations has been to seriously examine the ways women receive popular culture, given that so much pop culture is made by and for men." This is reflected in a variety of forms, including literature, music, film and other screen cultures.
Riot grrrl is an underground feminist punk movement that began during the early 1990s within the United States in Olympia, Washington, and the greater Pacific Northwest, and has expanded to at least 26 other countries. A subcultural movement that combines feminism, punk music, and politics, it is often associated with third-wave feminism, which is sometimes seen as having grown out of the riot grrrl movement and has recently been seen in fourth-wave feminist punk music that rose in the 2010s. The genre has also been described as coming out of indie rock, with the punk scene serving as an inspiration for a movement in which women could express anger, rage, and frustration, emotions considered socially acceptable for male songwriters but less commonly for women.
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