Invoking Eve’s temptation and fall from grace with recurring images of the garden, the serpent, and the apple, Condit provides a look at the trouble beneath the surface in a modern-day suburban paradise. As a housewife struggling to come to terms with the conflicting demands placed on her as a wife, mother, career-woman, and daughter, Anne finds she is divided against herself; her identity is a territory occupied by everyone’s needs but her own. Condit’s characteristic sing-song chants and use of the absurd underscore a wry sense of tragedy, as a picture of suburban bliss gone sour emerges.
Doldrums: On the Uncanny Domestic
Programmed by Elise Schierbeek | 1981 - 2014 | TRT 01:10:00
Video Details
Cecilia Condit | 1992 | 00:15:00 | United States | English | Color | Mono | 4:3 | Video
About this program:
Video Data Bank is pleased to present the VDB TV program Doldrums: On the Uncanny Domestic, programmed by Elise Schierbeek, VDB's Digital Collection and Media Manger. As spring awakens, the program takes us to blue skies, sunny subdivisions, and back indoors to feel something beneath it all.
Taking a cue from the evocative title of Stephanie Barber’s The Hunch that Caused the Winning Streak and Fought the Doldrums Mightily, this 70-minute program drifts through six works that rest on a sense of dread and eeriness within the home and suburban domesticity. Through varying modes, each work deals with a rupture of "the doldrums." Often, this takes the form of revealed contradictions – a haunting within the comfortable, an instability within the ordered. Works by Stephanie Barber, Cam Archer, Bob Snyder, Frédéric Moffet, Cecilia Condit, and Michael Robinson are included.
Elise has also written an accompanying essay that explores the relationship of the program to the concept of the uncanny and its psychoanalytical origins in ideas of home and video. The essay is available to read here.
