Angles: Women Working in Film and Video (2000)

June Brides « If women were supposedly liberated during the sexual revolution, why are we still finding it so hard to talk about our sexuality? Yeah, but who was really having a good time? Who knows how many people felt good about it or later on had to deal with their conscience about it. Was it strictly a revolution for men to get as much sex as they wanted? Were women really discovering their sexuality? I don’t think so. There’s a lot of people having to completely restructure their self-respect, to re-group, after what happened to them sexually. Sexual revolution or not, there’s still a stigma if a women is promiscuous—she’s a slut. It’s still there. It wasn’t that different in the 90s. Women still don’t own their sexual pleasure. That’s disturbing to me. »k’s films, ines live inimation. How do you see your film in the broader context of sexuality and AIDS? Somebody else asked me one time if this was an inappropriate film to make because of AIDS. There are a lot of people making AIDS consciousness films and videos. I wanted to open up the fact that we need to talk about different aspects of sexuality. I felt it was a very appropriate time to make a film like this. Interview first appeared in Angles, Volume 1, Number 3, 1992. © 1992 Elfrieda Abbe Cathy Cook teaches video and film production and animation at Sarah Lawrence College. Her recent work is Beyond Voluntary Control, an experimental film that deals with obsessions, phobias and diseases. Cook was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001. She is collaborating on a multimedia project with dancer David Figueroa. Her work has been shown at the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Museum of Modern Art, the Ann Arbor Film Festival and others. She did the art direction on Yvonne Rainer’s Murder and murder, Su Friedrich’s Hide and Seek and Zeinabu Davis's Compensation. She has an MFA in Film/Video and Women’s Studies from the Unversity of Wisconsin—Milwaukee. 10 @ ANGLES Filmography June Brides (10 min., 1987). “Cathy Cook flips the middle-class stereotypes of the church wedding on its head, mixing animation and performance to create a funny and poignant critique of marriage rituals.” —Cara Mertes, curator for “Dirt & Domesticity,” Whitney Museum of Art. Bust Up (7 min., 1989). A gender-bending tea party turned-horror story. The Match That Started My Fire (19 min., 1991). The telephone rings and the girl-talk begins: secrets emerge and confessions build. An exciting experimental comedy in which the joy of sexual pleasure is discovered and experienced by women in their childhood and early teens. Climbing a rope, descending a slide, being stung by insects ... a host of women tell their hilarious anecdotes of “the match that started their fire.” The film is a visual montage of images that evoke a world of 1960s kitsch and nostalgia, with occasional darker hints of taboo and transgression. Mother Nature (5 min., 1996). Mother? Why a mothere Who keeps those birch trees white anyway? And does “Mother” have any relationship to domestic household duties? This short film depicts the imagined, the assumed and the connotations connected to what most Earth dwellers believe are the responsibilities of Mother Nature. Beyond Voluntary Control (30 min., 2000). The film maker breaks new cinematic territory by devising a visual language that explores the psychological and emotional effects of physical confinement in her latest film, Beyond Voluntary Control. Stimulating the senses through haunting and poetic images, the film imaginatively conveys the obsessions, phobias and illnesses constricting personal freedom. While lyrically meditating on the limits of the body, Cook incorporates the evocative movements of modern dancer, David Figueroa, and blends a mesmerizing soundtrack set to the poems by Emily Dickinson and Sharon Olds. Through Figueroa’s gestures and dance, along with a moving interview of Cook’s own mother suffering from Parkinson’s, the film succeeds in humanizing and reconciling the effects of physical metamorphosis and stasis. Through artistry and visual astuteness, Beyond Voluntary Control innovatively investigates the limits of human physicality and movement.