Short film

5mins 16mm/BetacamSP Colour
© 1998 Go Girl Productions

synopsis:

A short study of the relationship between words and meaning. Twelve words, "A famous filmmaker said 'Cinema is the history of men filming women' " are rearranged twenty two times, to alter and subvert the original meaning of the statement. An exploration of the notion of 'truth' as contained in both image and language, this work aims to highlight the contrived nature of every filmed image.

crew:

Director/Camera/Edit/Sound - Janet Merewether
Video to film transfer - Toula Anastas
Mix - Greg Fitzgerald

reviews:

'Curiously interactive, seductively simple, Janet Merewether's five minute video Cheap Blonde lures its audience into playing along with no hands-on and not a mouse in sight. We're offered an apparently limited set of images, instructions and a computer generated voice which switches from male to female. This is a work so constucted that we laugh as sentences implode and explode like a poetry machine, as an image of a ‘cheap blonde’ who might have fallen out of some shampoo advertisement becomes a site of intimate reflection, as the twelve word sentence (" A famous filmmaker said 'Cinema is the history of men filming women' ") transforms radically into meaningful nonsense. This is every abstract gaze theory you've ever heard made wittily and powerfully palpable.'
Virginia Baxter(OnScreen/Realtime#26 Aug'98)
Review of dLux media arts' digital video program
'D.art', Sydney Film Festival, June 1998.

'..Cheap Blonde..ties in so neatly with what we do here at the Pacific Film Archive (PFA). When I saw Cheap Blonde I thought we could start each of our screenings with this commentary on cinema. Cheap Blonde before Bresson, or Shinoda, or Fassbinder, or Ford, or Wellman.....'
Steve Seid, Video Curator, Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archive, California

awards:

Honorable Mention - Ann Arbor Film Festival USA 1999

distribution:

Go Girl Productions
email go girl productions

North America / International
V tape, Toronto, tel: 1 (416) 351 1317
info@vtape.org
http://www.vtape.org

Europe
Montevideo, Amsterdam,
Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst
info@nimk.nl
http://nimk.nl/eng/contact-information/

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