28 ▼ 8 «p t*«n b » r 1881 ▼
out
■s’
Sadie Benning is a shooting star
Teenage video maker attracts a youthful audience using a Fisher Price Pixelvision plastic video camera
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by Ellen Spiro
44
^ ^ o u know, I ’ve been waiting for
I that day to com e when I could
walk the streets and people would
H
look at me and say, ‘T h a t's a
dyke,'” declares video artist Sadie
Benning in her work If Every Girl Had a Diary.
“ And if they didn’t like it, they would fall into
the center of the
earth and deal
with themselves.
Maybe they’d re
turn, but they’d
respect me.”
Seventeen-
year-old Benning
gives her audi
ences hope. Us
ing a cheap plastic
video camera (a Fisher Price Pixelvision), she
has created a series of deeply personal, artisti
cally deft, and politically charged works that
docum ent her evolving state o f mind. T ran
scending her medium, Benning confronts a vari
ety of experiences, from teen angst to societal
violence. In her recent videos (she has distrib
uted six through Video Data Bank of Chicago),
the traumas and ecstasy of adolescent dykedom
are left bare on the screen with outrageous hon
esty, immediacy, and wit.
One of Benning’s first public screenings was
a lesbian video show at Milwaukee’s W alker’s
Point Center for the Arts in July 1990. Her video
W elcome to Normal was shown recently at the
.
Coming out
on video
ways thought about that character, and I read it
again and again,” she recalls. A painful aware
ness of the absence of lesbian teenage represen
tations fueled her political awakening. “When
you’re growing up, the media totally ignore gay
and lesbian youth and gay people in general," she
asserts. “When I realized my feelings were
nowhere on TV or anywhere else, I shoved them
way down inside myself and cried to be some
it out from that,” she says. “The video was an
extension of my accepting (my lesbianism].”
At 16, in her junior year, the video m aker
dropped out of high school. As a gay teen in an
intolerant environment, B enning found that
school was hard on her, and she would often
come home depressed. In her high school, she
recounts, “everybody called each other ‘fag’ and
’queer,’ and the teachers would joke about gay
Benning’s videos began as an extension of
her written diaries, personal outpourings that she
methodically recorded while growing up in a
working-class M ilwaukee neighborhood. She
kept these documents of her youth well hidden in
her bedroom.
Then at 15, Benning made her first video,
New Year, a ten-minute tape created with the
Pixelvision camera she got for Christmas from
her father, who is an experimental filmmaker.
She describes her creative process: “I just wake
up in the middle of the night and go at it. Some
times I c an ’t fall asleep because I ’m thinking
about something, so I start shooting. I t’s
spontaneous.” New Year was also the start of her
coming-out period, frankly unveiled in her sub
sequent videos.
Rita Mae B row n’s novel Rubyfruit Jungle
inspired Benning’s third video, Me and R u
byfruit, which chronicles the enchantm ent of
teenage lesbian love. When she first picked up
B row n's book, Benning was amazed to read
about Molly Bolt, a sort o f lesbian Huck Finn
character with whom she could identify. "I al
thing else. And then at a certain point, all those
feelings surfaced back up, and I couldn’t ignore
them.”
With the help of Me and Rubyfruit, Benning
began to come out to her friends by privately
screening the work. “I would show them what I
was working on, and they would kind of figure
people. I just didn’t want to be put through that
abuse. I was in a really fragile state, and I knew
that if anybody knew I was gay, I would totally
get tormented. School was really difficult. To
be that age anyway is tough, but to be gay is just
hell.”
So Benning stopped going to school and
prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art in
New York City, and others will be screened at a
number of lesbian and gay film and video festi
vals.
“AMAZING!
...high pitched
attitude and an
incredible cast.”
Having a ball**, wish you were here!
- Lawrence Fraaceila,
US Magazine
Beautiful, lively
and intelligent!”
-Terrence Rafferty,
The New Yorker
OUTRAGEOUS!
One of the best films I’ve seen this year!”
-J o e l Siegel, Good Morning America
EXHILARATING!
A provocative, poignant film that makes most
of the big Hollywood summer movies look
boring by comparison.”
— David Ansen, Newsweek
“EXTRAORDINARY!
A film of wit, insight and enormous compassion.”
— David Ehrenstein, Advocate
®
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