Skip to main content

Not a Jealous Bone

Cecelia Condit

1987 00:11:00 United StatesEnglishColor4:3Video

Description

Invoking a biblical story of life coming from dry bones, Condit constructs an experimental narrative about an older woman’s confrontation with her own mortality after the death of her mother. The bone represents the promise of youth and hope—a promise jealously coveted by the young, but needed more by those grown old. Inverting cultural values, Condit represents feminine youth as a mannequin, and seeks humanity in the form of the older woman, who is reborn by overcoming her fear of death.

This title is also available on Cecelia Condit Videoworks: Volume 1.

About Cecelia Condit

Since the early 1980s Cecelia Condit’s narrative videos have explored the not-so-average experiences of the “average woman” in a social climate of sublimated violence, fear, and misogynist aggression. Her dark-humored works conflate fairy tale morals with the grisly sensationalism of tabloid headlines, incorporating live action, appropriated television images, and original music into frequently operatic narratives. Condit is a Professor Emerita of Film and Video at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

"My work centers around the theme of how bizarre events disrupt mundane lives. By contrasting the commonplace with the macabre, humor with the absurd, I address a reality that is both surprisingly believable, yet strange enough to belong only to the realm of fiction."
— Cecelia Condit  

Mary L. Nohl Fellowship, Greater Milwaukee Foundation, 2005