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]
| Girl Power | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Sadie Benning |
Release date |
|
Running time | 15 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
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.
References
edit- ^ Curnutte, Rick. "The Film Journal". Child's Play: The Pixelvision Videos of Sadie Benning. Movie Review Query Engine. Retrieved 2013-04-25.
- ^ a b c Holmlund, Chris (1997). Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. p. 133. ISBN 0816627754.
- ^ "PixelVision". Balagan Experimental Film & Video Series. Retrieved April 24, 2013.
- ^ "Girl Power". Video Data Bank.
- ^ Freeman, Elizabeth (2013). Deep Lez: Temporal Drag and Specters of Feminism. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories: Duke University Press. pp. 82. ISBN 978-0822348047.
- ^ Kearney, Mary (2003). Girls Make Movies. Youth Cultures: Texts, Images, and Identities: Praeger Publishers. p. 22. ISBN 9780275974091.
External links
edit- Girl Power at IMDb
- Video Data Bank includes a clip from the video as well as a summary description
- Art Lies: A Contemporary Art Journal includes biographical information about the artist who produces the work
