A comedy about a troop of shield-bearing Amazons who take over city institutions before relaxing in the country. "Superdyke takes women into the streets when Barbara arms a platoon of vagina warriors with Amazon shields in an attempt to overthrow San Francisco. They march through City Hall, usurp the bus lines, demythologize the consumer mentality at Macy's (to the recorded astonishment of casual shoppers), and wander through the erotic art museum. Barbara's frenetic handheld lens catches the startled reactions and the glee of the participants. Superdyke has a home-movie quality to it, but its committed and loose moments in the playground confirm its comic rationale."
An experimental documentary that explores the shifting terrain of gender identity. The film includes vividly charged discussions with Audrey, who insists that she is Superman, along with views of her obsessive role-playing during her daily life out in the "real" world. Playful and arresting, Audrey de-cloaks from Clark Kent to Superman, revealing her "secret identity" as a boy. She does push-ups, practices flying, and imagines "saving the police from the bad guy." She ruminates "to have a girlfriend I have to be a boy," all the while drawing us into her state of transformation. The unscripted narrative was built through the collaboration of mother and daughter, with Audrey youthfully honest and willing to reveal her inner emotional state. She is open as only a six year old could be.
Pony Glass is the story of comic book character Jimmy Olsen's secret life. In this 15-minute cutout animation Superman's pal embarks on his most adult adventure ever as he navigates the treacherous shoals of early '60s romance trying to resolve a sexual identity crisis of epic proportions. A three-act melodrama -each act has its own song- filmed in Klahr's signature collage style that "unmasks" our collective iconic inheritance as Americans while significantly expanding the notion of what a music video can do.
"Klahr cruises the elysian backstreets of childhood comic books to make a set of 'musicals' ripened by blue-eyed melos and soul-searching psychodrama. Cub reporter Jimmy Olsen proves to be a pony of a different stripe and a man of steel as he ascends beyond good and evil in this bittersweet bildungsroman." - Mark McElhatten, New York Film Festival. In a different vein is Lewis Klahr's Pony Glass . . . The central character of this cartoon collage, whose visual focus is in the 1950s, is Jimmy Olsen, the cub reporter from 'Superman', who is imagined in scenarios with musical accompaniment dealing with racial and sexual anxiety. The character is liberated from a repressed Milquetoast into a figure posed in various pornographic couplings. The synergy of intense pop music and cartoons makes for a disturbingly heady meditation on transgressive imagery and popular culture."
"Less fussy and far more transgressive than his previous work, Klahr's collage animation Pony Glass makes comic-book hero Jimmy Olsen the locus of desperate anxieties about sexuality and race. The film is so charged with fear and desire that a simple iris down to black made the hair stand up on the back of my neck."
A stutter-step progression of extended moments unmasks the technological miracle of Wonder Woman's transformation, playing on the psychological transformation of a television product. Birnbaum considers this tape an "altered state [that] renders the viewer capable of re-examining those looks which on the surface seem so banal that even the super-natural transformation of a secretary into a 'Wonder Woman' is reduced to a burst of blinding light and a turn of the body -a child's play of rhythmical devices inserted within the morose belligerence of the fodder that is our average television diet."
Live-action, hand-drawn and computer graphic animation drive this high-speed fractured narrative about a Dionysian superhero who sometimes has to punch out Batman for being too goody-goody. Superhero is an updated personalized humorous response to our traditional cartoon hero story.
An absurd, weirdo imagining of a rubber-stamped "dyke dollar" come to life, Dyke Dollar is a comedy about gay activism and identity politics as seen through the eyes of teenage boys in Suburban New York. Starring Lisa Haas as the Dyke Dollar herself.
Torsten Zenas Burns
color, sound, 16 min.
A role-playing workshop where participants reenact a fictional polyamorous romance leads to a group wedding and honeymoon between characters based on two obscure Marvel superheroes and two internationally renowned art personalities. The happy foursome are Stelarc, an artist whose cybernetic mission in life is to render the body obsolete; Orlan, an artist whose actual redefinition of her own body via plastic surgery confronts representations of woman throughout art history; the Scarlet Witch, a mutant superhero who has unlimited powers over probability, and the Vision, a "synthezoid" whose mechanically fabricated body contains a human soul. What If? unfolds the entangled story that brought this romantic foursome together, spanning the gulf between genders and representations; the body and technology.
- Opening Night
- Secret Identities
- The Personal is Revolutionary
- Passionate Politics: The Life and Work of Charlotte Bunch
- Fantastic Magick
- Arabesque
- De Profundis
- How The West Was Won: A Bob Mizer Film Sampler
- Flaming Ears
- A Different Take
- Invasion of the Talkies
- NOISE
- Bodily Fluid is Revolutionary
- Don't Stop
- Community Action Center
- Mapping Fields
- Un Ovni Sobre Mi Cama (A UFO Over My Bed)
