From: email suppressed
Date: Wed May 11 2005 - 22:46:56 PDT
In a message dated 5/8/05 10:47:18 PM, email suppressed writes:
> So does anyone have any interesting thoughts on how identity -
> especially 'fake' identity - operates within the experimental film
> constellation? What different aesthetic trajectories are cut out by
> 'real names' as opposed to pseudonyms?
>
I just read your post and thought of something that Barbara Hammer said
about the web about 10 years ago. She said that on-line anyone can be a lesbian.
At this time this statement had a sense of newness that it has since lost,
but what I liked about the way she said it was that she didn't seem to want to
gard against the possibility of other people claiming an identity that did
not arise from an individual's experiences of love, attraction, desire. She
was welcoming the idea that non-lesbians could "try-on" the identity, could use
the internet as a place to experiment with themselves, to empathize with the
experiences of others. Its also interesting that Barbara said this, since so
much of the reception of her work has centered on her identity as a lesbian.
Many have called her an essentialist or will only write about her work in the
context of identity politics and yet I've always found that the aesthetics,
structure and implications of her films simply can't be captured by a reception
that insists upon reducing it to identity / politics.
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.