BLOWING THE TRUMPET TO THE TULIPS
Film + Video Series

Tuesday, October 23, 7pm
Ontario Hall

I've Got My Mama's Mouth

Spiders in Love: An Arachnogasmic Musical by Martha Colburn, USA, 1999, Super 8 on 16mm, 2.5 min.
Birthday Suit, with scars and defects by Lisa Steele, Canada, 1974, video, 12 minutes
Orientation Express by Francis Leeming, Canada, 1987, 16mm on video, 14 minutes
Numerology of Fear by Janine Marchessault, Canada, 1998, video, 18 minutes
Water Sark by Joyce Wieland, Canada, 1966, 16mm, 14 minutes
Nest of Tens by Miranda July, USA, 1999, video, 26 minutes
Being Fucked Up by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, Canada, 2001, video, 11.5 minutes

Programme running time: 98 minutes

Feminist artists have been great contributors to the Do it Yourself movement, whether in film, music or fanzines. This stems in part from the war cry, "the personal is political", and in part from a concerted resistance and defiance of the masculinist codes of popular representation. The works assembled in this programme offer a short history of the use of experimental media by women from the sixties work of Joyce Wieland to more recent productions by men and women like Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby.

In Water Sark, Joyce Wieland transforms the domestic space of her kitchen into a stage for her handmade art. Performing in her Birthday Suit, Steele reveals her (many) scars to the camera in order to question externally imposed constructions of beauty. For Numerology of Fear, Janine Marchessault turns to the psychological scars that cause fear and interrogates science's role in alleviating or compounding those fears. Francis Leeming's Orientation Express tackles gender roles and stereotypes by piecing together thirty years of domestic and nation-building images.

Leeming's hand cut images bring to mind the collage work of the 'zine culture which has thrived over the last 15 years in punk circles. The cross-pollination between music, zines and film/video has become more apparent and this network has punked up the gender politics of its participants and audience. Artists like Martha Colburn and Miranda July show the breadth of that scene. Colburn collaborates with musicians like Jad Fair from Half Japanese to create soundtracks for her Super 8 collage pieces. July has CDs out on microlabels such as Kill Rock Stars and has contributed to zine culture by starting the girls-only video chainletter, Big Miss Movieola (now Joanie 4 Jackie). The work of Colburn, July, and their Canadian cousins Vey Duke & Battersby, show common traits of the vast D.i.Y. culture: a lo-fi approach and a personal, unapologetic politics.

-- Chris Kennedy & Sarah Robayo Sheridan

See more details on Blowing the Trumpet to the Tulips, an exchange on experimental media, October 19 - 21, 2001.

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