Block 1. Queer Experiences of a Body

It Wasn’t Love

Benning illustrates a lustful encounter with a “bad girl,” through the gender posturing and genre interplay of Hollywood stereotypes: posing for the camera as the rebel, the platinum blonde, the gangster, the '50s crooner, and the heavy-lidded vamp. Cigarette poses, romantic slow dancing, and fast-action heavy metal street shots propel the viewer through the story of the love affair. Benning’s video goes farther than romantic fantasy, describing other facets of physical attraction including fear, violence, lust, guilt and total excitement. As she puts it, “It wasn’t love, but it was something...” It was a chance to feel glamorous, sexy and famous, all at the same time.

Her Sweetness Lingers

A video poem about one woman's longing and desire for another whom she is shy to approach. The use of multiple layering of images, intense colour saturation, close-ups and a lush nature setting with flowering plants and insects create a tactile and sensuous visual poem.

kore

By focusing on the blindfold, kore explores the eye as purveyor of desire, sexual fear, and the fantasy of blindness. An alternative sexuality is founded in touch-based (feminine?) pleasure as opposed to a vision-based (masculine?) pleasure. An examination of institutional blindspots towards women, and people of color, concerning AIDS expands on the issue of vision, visibility and the disease.

Sniff

In a stark white room, a naked man is crawling in a circle on an unmade bed. He is trying to remember the men he had sex with on the bed by searching for their smells. A fragmentary account of his encounters is layered within a dense electronic soundscape of whispering voices, evoking a sense of whispering voices, evoking a sense of memory and loss and the fear of death.