Love-letters for SOME KIND OF LOVING

RES Magazine:
"Titled SOME KIND OF LOVING and curated by Astria Suparak, the new installment is an oozing, unctuous bunch of sex films that swings from the low budget Freudian antics in PEGGY AHWESH's classic "Martina's Playhouse" to the deconstructive impulses that rip through STEPHANIE BARBER's "pornfilm." All six films in the collection traipse through uncharted sexual terrain, using rough-and-ready low-end video and an appealing anti-aesthetic. Coarse and scruffy, yes, but also very hot, in a weird sort of way." - "Sex, Lies and Videotape"




Bust Magazine:
"SOME KIND OF LOVING, curated by Astria Suparak, features five different filmmakers presenting pieces shot using various techniques [including super-8, home video, and stop-motion animation] about sex, women, and modern culture. I love this compilation and the series idea, and will look forward to seeing what JOANIE 4 JACKIE comes out with next. If you have any interest at all in women in film and video today, you should definitely get this tape." -- Kristin, "Chix in flix"


The Willamette Week:
"Of the five films to be screened, the Brakhagian "Fine Lines" by Britain's JANE GANG is a haunting rant against the death of perception, while JENNIFER REEDER's "Lullaby" is a disturbing collision between pop culture and personal identity." - Steffen Silvis


Pacific Film Archives:
Some Kind of Loving "tracks female sexuality through the quagmire of loony and lascivious cultural codes." - Steve Seid, Curator


Come here for real-time movie clips, pictures of the artists, and more...



Variations on the Some Kind of Loving theme:

In Step:
Sexuality Malfunctioned - (Performance) Anxiety, Ambivalence, Anticipation.

"Curated by Astria Suparak, Film Series Director at Pratt Institute, Sexuality Malfunctioned's entire program runs less than ninety minutes but will nevertheless prove daunting to the Marcus-minded masses. Nothing fits easily in these b short films and videos (and one audio-piece) - either the soundtrack sits uncomfortably on top of the image like a Coke can floating in a pond or a variety of devices are used to obscure the image or both. This is doubly disorienting because much of the imagery is pornographic and violent (often simultaneously) and the tweaking offers little moral edification.

Still, because Suparak has programmed Sexuality Malfunctioned like a perfectly coherent essay, one need only keep in mind her précis from the program notes to begin to see how these bursts of mismatching energy actually signify: "Dis-ease and uncomfort within desire explored through techniques such as hand-painting, manipulated found-footage (and pornography), optical printing and stop-motion animation. Sexual development in the age of the spectacle."

That description definitely brings an ecstatic question mark of a film like Stephanie Barber's, who has taught in UWM's film department, six-minute P ornfilm (1998) more into focus. A shaky reading of a news item on Regis Philbin's breakup with his alcoholic wife Kay becomes the new soundtrack to an anonymous porn loop which is further manipulated by a white block that scans vertically back and forth over the image. Then Barber cuts to a brief animated segment of little snowflake-like wheels dancing in white space to (or under, more precisely?) an opera aria. Hmm.

For sure, there's no way to assign a definite take on sex or sexuality here leaving a somewhat frightening void where one would normally find a conscience (or consciousness) - even the "S. Barber" tag at the end possesses a sort of renegade anonymity. But isn't the underlying idea of a take in cinema to denote that there exists a right or even perfect way to film something? Or, by extension, t bo fuck someone?

It's difficult to formulate any questions about Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley's 1987 video Family Tyranny (Modeling and Molding) much less derive answers from it. You can't even tell who was responsible for such a nightmarish vision (frequently attributed to the above duo, the director is listed as Nancy Buchanan). It just takes you to this awful, awful place for eight minutes where a father force feeds a surrogate (Styrofoam?) son through a funnel. The son soon materializes as a moaning bundle of hopelessness like an idiot from a Beckett play. He tries to escape through a window in their Astroturfed set, cowers under a table and eventually leaves for school with the father taunting him most of the time. At the end, he's a little boy doll that dad bathes/drowns in a tin cup of watery plaster (?). Apart from Christopher Rage's fisting video Fucked Up and accidentally playing a 45 rpm Virgin Prunes 12" on 33 when I was thirteen, this is the most disturbing artistic experience of my life.

Other highlights include Miranda July's audio piece "WSNO" - a painful talk radio parody where the host takes calls only from people with secrets; Laura Parnes' Performance (1995) and Talent Show (1996) which juxtaposes found footage of an 8th grade talent show in the former and young boys lip-syncing in the latter combined with Truth or Truth early sex litanies; Luther Price's Sodom which I haven't seen but I'm told has had many offended walk-outs (I'm there!!); and if you can make the show in Madison the night before (9pm, Starlight Cinema), the program replaces the Barber and Price films with two terrific films by Peggy Ahwesh, Martina's Playhouse which comes across as an exploration into the last shot of Milena in Bad Timing - A Sensual Obsession (three-year old girl forges narratives outside the Master's house) and The Color of Love which is dedicated to Doris W bishman (guess I'll have to give Bad Girls Go To Hell another look). - Kevin John

P.S. Of course, I've seen Luther Price's Sodom now (this article was a preview of the show) and indeed it prompted at least two walk-outs (I have to admit that they only served to rev up the film's already very, very powerful motor). In its refusal to offer an escape route to the viewer (covering your eyes would probably be more terrifying and plugging your ears certainly doesn't comfort), Sodom reminded me of Richard Kern's great art-porn depictions of The Inferno such as Submit To Me and Submit To Me Now. But textuality is more diseased in Sodom - the eventually backwards chants invoking nausea on the soundtrack; the circles of quick-cut imagery breaking through the surface like a chancre; the pre-condom gay porn competing for foreground with footage of immolation (?) and cultish (?) masses. If an aftermath can be assigned to all this bedlam, it only promises burning sensations during urination and much, much worse to come." - Kevin John