Camera Obscura articles from December 2003

Camera Obscura archives from December 2003

Editor's note on "dossier on women and video: histories and practices".
December 1, 2003... In North America, video and feminism have shared a history since the heady 1970s. There seems to be an almost "organic relationship," in contributor Laura Marks's phrase, "between the materiality of the medium and its expressive and political...

Feminism 101: the New York Women's Video Festival, 1972-1980.
December 1, 2003... >From 1972 to 1980, the New York Women's Video Festival was the primary showcase for work by American women videomakers. A landmark annual event founded by Steina Vasulka in 1972 to address the dearth of work by women in a video art show she...

What is that and between Arab women and video? The case of Beirut.
December 1, 2003... For Western scholars and artists, the phrase "women and video" brings to mind the heady days of feminist video production in North American (as well as European and Australian) cities in the early 1970s. Compared to film, the newly available...

No woman is an object: realizing the feminist collaborative video.
December 1, 2003... No woman is filmed as an object; everyone is a subject who combines and presents physical, emotional, intellectual, and political selves. --Julia Lesage, "The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film" Feminist...

Marina Abramovic's performance: stresses on the body and psyche in installation art.
December 1, 2003... Among the most prolific, accomplished, challenging, and disturbing of international performance artists, Marina Abramovic has also become a key figure for those of us interested in the intersection of performance art, installation work, and...

Interview with Patty Chang.
December 1, 2003... In discussing her 1999 show, Fountain, at New York's Jack TiltonGallery, New York artist Patty Chang cites the work of Marina Abramovic and Jean Cocteau as inspiration. This is a fitting way to summarize two major strains in Chang's work: the...

The politics of disappointment: Todd Haynes rewrites Douglas Sirk.
December 1, 2003... Condensation and Displacement Far from Heaven (US/France, 2002), Todd Haynes's lush, lurid, strikingly amplified homage to Douglas Sirk, bristles with reworkings of Sirk's signature effects as it consistently evokes his 1950s melodramas of...

Twin pleasures of feminism: Orlando meets My Twentieth Century.
December 1, 2003... Spectatorship Perhaps it is forgivable to begin an investigation of female pleasure and agency by reflecting on my own first encounter with Orlando (dir: Sally Potter, UK/Russia/France/Italy/Netherlands, 1992) as a spectator, which...

Books received.
December 1, 2003... Ascheid, Autje. Hitler's Heroines: Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. Bailey, David A., and Gilane Tawadros, eds. Veil: Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art. Cambridge: MIT Press,...