She Heard Voices

Inspired by Max Ernst’s picture book, The Hundred Headless Women, Rankus presents a collage of Surrealist motifs in this “fractured fairy tale” about a heroine threatened by a psychic usurper. The predator is the telephone, empowering disembodied voices and authorizing their faceless demands.

“The ultimate irony of the tape lies in its silence. The viewer becomes a participant in the tele-predation, as the voice without a voice turns out to be the viewer’s subverbalized reading of the captions.”

—Michael Nash, “Video Poetics,” High Performance 10:1 (1987)

This title is also available on Ed Rankus Videoworks: Volume 1.