SCREENCAPS (click for larger view):
--> Useless IMDb - The Judy Spots
--> Useless IMDb - Flat is Beautiful
--> Useless IMDb - German Song
--> Senses of Cinema
--> Bright Light Film Journal
--> Art Journal
--> The Eye interview
--> FilmComment's Gavin Smith interview
"So, why is flat beautiful, exactly?"
She laughs. "Well, it's more of a question, really, rather than a statement. I mean, I literally took it from this T-shirt I found in a thrift shop, from the '70s -- you know, all these flat-chested women wanted to show the world they were sexy too, so they started advertising it like that: 'Hey, man, flat is beautiful!' But the more I thought about it the more I saw it as a question about how we define what even gets to be beautiful, as opposed to just weird.
"The main character of Flat Is Beautiful is Taylor, who's this androgynous young girl living in working-class Milwaukee, back in the '80s -- it's fairly autobiographical, obviously, like everything else I do. Only this time, I wanted to apply this feeling of alienation from what's perceived as 'acceptable' to everyone in the movie: Taylor, who tells people she's going to be a boy when she grows up, like she's really got a choice; her mom, who overworks and overeats, and tries way too hard; and their gay neighbor upstairs, who puts on a dress and dances to 'Crazy on You' by Heart. Where do you fit in, if you can't see yourself as falling under any of the 'normal' categories?" (from The Eye)
Twenty-five-year-old independent filmmaker Sadie Benning has made some of the best pure cinema of the past ten years. If you can't name any of her films, that's because she makes videos. If you can't find them on MTV or at Blockbuster, that's because she isn't distributed commercially. By opting for marginality to ensure a dissenting social relevance and artistic freedom, Benning is content with a cult or specialized following, the lot particularly of those who choose not to transfer video to film on aesthetic grounds.
From 1989 through 1992, Benning made ten Pixelvision tapes, varying in length from five to 20 minutes. The deceptively naive and primitive textures and laconic attitude of these first-person diaristic essays revealed the complex reflections and layered associations of an acute, radical intelligence and a stunningly inventive visual sensibility.
[...]
Her new work, Flat Is Beautiful, is filmmaking of the highest order, the equal of anything I've seen at the movies this year. It is an autobiographical, 50-minute portrait of the solitary world of a 12-year-old girl called Taylor (Sammy Steel), a latchkey child subsisting on a diet of' TV dinners, video games, and television in a poor Milwaukee neighborhood in the mid-Eighties. Left to her own devices by a loving but overtaxed working mother and frustrated by her strained long-distance relationship with her self-involved father, she experiences an emotional isolation and prepubescent sexual confusion scarcely mitigated by the presence of a sympathetic gay man who rents a room in the house. A sense of malaise and socioeconomic constriction prevails, exacerbated by peers who look askance at her tomboy androgyny.
Benning employs a number of formal strategies to map the psychic terrain of her protagonist. For one thing, she supplements the adrift camera subjectivity of Pixelvision with more formally shot black-and-white Super-8 for "objective" exterior street scenes, affording alternately harsh and dreamlike visual textures. But her most audacious gambit is that all the performers wear paper masks with hand-drawn faces, imposing a constant element of stylization onto an otherwise naturalistic representation. This initially distancing device is rapidly recuperated and normalized, paradoxically enabling Benning to ascend to a high level of emotional engagement and psychological nuance. Offsetting Sammy Steel's wonderfully naturalistic performance, the broad, satiric characterizations of the adults, particularly Taylor's father, are in the same register as Benning's Judy Spots puppetry and animation. The tape's psychological complexity derives instead from Benning's way of seeing the world: her dislocation and reinvention of emotional space in two dimensions (the imaginary spaces of TV, video games, drawing pictures, billboards and murals -- the flat landscapes of the title perhaps) and her camera's attentive, up-close relationship to "peripheral" yet evocative details and objects externalize the dualities, confusions, and displacements of gender and identity. The film's dominant mood is of becalmed anticipation, the calm or stasis before the storm -- in this case, the charged, fleeting interval between childhood and adolescence. Pixelvision's faint image, like a weak signal from a distant star, here seems the only imaginable means of transmission for Benning's haunting, lyrical retrospection.
(Gavin Smith - Film Comment )
This is much more mature works than the previous collection I've released. There's the usual benning PixelVision action, but also lot of surrealistic techniques, stop motion animation, hot sex between people with funny masks on, puppetry, funky video effects...VIDEO: [DIVX - FFmpeg] 704x480 24bpp 23,976 fps 1174,7 kbps (143,4 kbyte/s)
AUDIO: [MP3] 48000 Hz, 2 ch, 16 bit (0x10), ratio: 8000->192000 (64,0 kbit)
Note: I've not rescaled the movie to preserve quality, so if your player doesn't do it for you, set the aspect to 4:3 manually. Some interlaced frames here and there, sorry.
Highly Recommended.THE LINK:
Sadie Benning - VideoWorks Vol.3 (Judy Spots - Flat is Beautiful - 70min).avi 
