Episiotomy

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1990, Super-8 color sound, 13 mins.

This Super-8mm film was shot off of a French soft-core pornographic comic book, against a variety of urban backgrounds in both France and the USA. The sounds of those environments intrude upon the pictures, sometimes enhancing and sometimes subeverting the narrative. I was interested in telling a story, but devising a narrative structure to the film that was unrelated to the story. Thus the rhythm and cadence of the narrative runs obscured somewhere beneath the surface of the film's mechanics.

By using in-camera editing, contradictory juxtapositions of image and sound, and a variety of backdrops, physical forces and arbitrary events, the two narrative threads interweave and occasionally intersect, creating moments of dramatic punctuation which are mostly accidental. Oddly enough, the story itself, though it is diminished, disrupted and often ignored by the film's narrative structure, still seems to evoke a logical continuity; and despite all the distractions and activity around the edges of the frame, one's attention is still drawn toward the "events" represented on those flimsy pieces of paper.