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Girl Power

Sadie Benning

1992 00:15:00 United StatesEnglishB&WMono
Tags:
Diary, Feminism, LGBTQ, Pixelvision, Sexuality

Description

Set to music by Bikini Kill (an all-girl band from Washington), Sadie Benning's Girl Power is a raucous vision of what it means to be a radical girl in the 1990s. Benning relates her personal rebellion against school, family, and female stereotypes as a story of personal freedom, telling how she used to model like Matt Dillon and skip school to have adventures alone. Informed by the underground “riot grrrl” movement, this tape transforms the image politics of female youth, rejecting traditional passivity and polite compliance in favor of radical independence and a self-determined sexual identity.

Spanish subtitled version available.

This title is also available on Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 2.

About Sadie Benning

Sadie Benning began making videos at 15-years old, using a Fisher Price Pixelvision toy camera. Benning's early works were made in the privacy of their childhood bedroom, using scrawled and handwritten text from diary entries to record thoughts and images that reveal the longings and complexities of a developing identity. Evoking in turn playful seduction and painful honesty, Benning’s floating, close-up camera functions as a witness to their intimate revelations, and as an accomplice in defining their evocative experimental form. Sadie's work emerges from a place half-innocent and half-adult — with all the honesty, humor, and desperation of a personality just coming into self-awareness, trapped and uneasy. Their more recent work moves beyond the Pixelvision camera and into animation, film and installation.

Sadie Benning is a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow.