Film Catalog: Online Search

Cecilia Dougherty

Claudia (1987) VHS NTSC, color, 7.5 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Body, Erotic, Political / Social Activism

"And what of girls, lesbians, the ultimate stereotypes? Claudia opens with a distant bay, oil derricks in a chemical haze, landscape littered with industrial debris. An 'establishing shot,' establishing nothing but itself: A hallucinatory science fiction beauty in which to indulge. Car in the driveway, mundane but for the sublime glide along its metal. Woman's body on a bed. Indecipherable murmurings, some sex. As if it's forbidden, impossible, to see your own body, 'Girl,' searching the mirror for something you call your 'self.'" -- Laurie Weeks Sale:$50 individual, $100 institutional

Rental: $50.00 Sale: $100.00 (VHS NTSC)

Cecilia Dougherty

Coal Miner's Granddaughter (1991) VHS NTSC, color, sound, 80 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Biography & Autobiography, Films about Film, Media, Personal / Diary / Journal, Philosophical

"In Coal Miner's Granddaughter, Cecilia restages autobiographical elements. Memory, fantasy, the movies, TV, contaminate one another to highlight the impossibility of unsplicing, separating out, influences in the neurons that make me; the futility of recovering origin. Media is biology-Delicious, horrible 'acting' exposes the in-authenticity of realism as conduit to truth. Everyday life is performance-events are arranged; disarranges -- we're unstuck in the space-time continuum. Disorientation precludes reabsorption into moralizing." -- Laurie Weeks Sale: $100 individual, $200 institutional

Rental: $75.00

Cecilia Dougherty

The Drama of the Gifted Child (1992) VHS NTSC, color, sound, 5.5 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Erotic, Literature & Theater, Psychology & Mental Health

This tape is about narcissistic transference, sexual dependency, pedagogy, and a failure to distinguish between one's self and the loved one. It is also about how love relationships are used to create a protective border between the self and political/psychological oppression. The tape is based psychologist Alice Miller's book of the same title. Sale: $30 individual, $75 institutional

Rental: $30.00

Cecilia Dougherty

The Dream and The Waking (1997) VHS NTSC, color, sound, 15 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Art & Artists, Personal / Diary / Journal

"In The dream and the waking, tongue, speech, have disappeared almost entirely. Instead, language scrolls across the screen as we travel by bus through a grim and crumbling cityscape. Language reveals itself as material, image. The film takes place from behind the eyes of the filmmaker, enduring a weekly round-trip from New York to her job in Boston, and exhausting and demoralizing routing. But editing opens a line of escape, induces proprioceptive states that counter the landscape's narcoleptic effect. Filters and stop-motion, layering, sweep us away. The freeway, conveyor belt to hell, populated by zombies, metamorphoses into a lush poetics of shifting geometries. The landscape tilts, skids away in slow-motion-a carnival ride where the distancing of interpretive thought is subsumed in a molasses careen of sensation-a strange suturing occurs between mind and body, viewer and viewed. The video ends, the pleasurable estrangement lingers." -- Leah Gilliam and Elisabeth Subrin Sale: $75 individual, $100 institutional

Rental: $50.00

Cecilia Dougherty

Eileen (2000) DVD NTSC, color, sound, 10 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Biography & Autobiography, Found Footage

Eileen is a home movie of Eileen Myles in her legendary 3rd St. apartment, with her pit bull Rosie. I based the tape's style on some Beat home movies I saw a couple years ago, thinking how much Eileen's work is influenced by them and by the New York School of poets, specifically Frank O'Hara, whose work Eileen's reminds me of. She's reading from her novel entitled "Cool for You."

Rental: $75.00

Cecilia Dougherty

Grapefruit (1989) VHS NTSC, color, sound, 39 min

Genre: Experimental, Narrative

Keywords: Art & Artists, Biography & Autobiography, History

"In Cecilia Dougherty's Grapefruit, based obliquely on Yoko Ono's book, often ludicrous moments from John and Yoko's charmed history are reconstructed. An all-female cast (aside from one male go-go dancer) makes this a gentle mockery lingering on the banal squabbles of the Fab Four and John and Yoko's deliberate denuding of their private lives. The ersatz philosophy comically espoused in Grapefruit casts doubt on the past's ability to adequately inform the present. For Dougherty, this glance backwards doesn't seek reassurance or queasy remembrance. It's an experiment in crippled nostalgia." -- Steve Seid Sale: $100 individual, $200 institutional

Rental: $75.00

Cecilia Dougherty

Joe-Joe (1993) VHS NTSC, color, sound, 52 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Art & Artists, Erotic, Queer / Bi / Trans

"In this tape, the life of gay playwright Joe Orton becomes the raw material for a queer lesbian theater of the absurd. Dougherty and Singer manage to create just the right visual universe for Joe-Joe and for their various enterprises: literary, sexual, familiar and otherwise. Primitive pixelvision-" -- Judith Halberstam Sale: $100 individual, $200 institutional

Rental: $75.00

Cecilia Dougherty

Laurie (1998) VHS NTSC, color, sound, 11 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Art & Artists, Biography & Autobiography

This tape is a stylized, sentimentalized, romanticized portrait of East Village writer Laurie Weeks. Weeks's writing is a combination of fact, fiction and fear, and I have tried to capture those qualities on tape. A good deal of melodrama seems to capture the mood precisely. Sale: $75 individual, $100 institutional

Rental: $50.00

Cecilia Dougherty

Leslie (1998) VHS NTSC, color, sound, 11 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Biography & Autobiography

Leslie is a fractured portrait of San Francisco Bay Area language poet Leslie Scalapino. In this tape, I re-enter and re-present Leslie's writing using only video language and pictorial structure. My idea is to put the writer inside the fiction or structure of her own writing, creating a story (fiction) about the writer herself. Visual fan letter. Sale: $75 individual, $100 institutional

Rental: $75.00

Cecilia Dougherty

My Failure to Assimilate (1995) VHS NTSC, color, sound, 20 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Art & Artists, Environment & Nature, Ethnic / Multicultural

"In My Failure to Assimilate, conversation, experience and descriptive memory are collaged together to create a range of intimate, disjunctive portraits-contrasted with a contemplative voyeurism. Simple street scenes and exteriors take on mythic proportions [and] the formal elements are resolutely video-graphic-lush, saturated and strobed." -- Leah Gilliam and Elisabeth Subrin Sale: $75 individual, $100 institutional

Rental: $50.00