Strange Weather
50:00 1993
Directors: Peggy Ahwesh & Margie Strosser
Producer: Margie Strosser
Cinematography: Peggy Ahwesh
With:
Jennifer Key Baker
Deidre Lewis
Cheryl Dunye
Franck Messin
50 minutes
U-matic or VHS video (NTSC)
Black & White (Pixelvision)
English
R18 Certificate
[quote]Strange Weather presents a claustrophobic day in the life of a young woman, Patti and her cohorts, who are holed up in a house in South Florida smoking crack cocaine. Hurricane Andrew is brewing off the coast and they aren’t paying attention. This episodic anti-drama explores their private world of emotional blackmail, obsessive gestures, and languorous attention to domestic detail. Occasionally, Patti surfaces, directly addressing the camera with a gritty account of the elusive glamour of Miami, and her desperate adventures in the drug culture. Strange Weather engages the controversial position of drug-taking in our culture; shows the unsensationalized flip-side of taking drugs; and points to issues of morality, health, excess, and truth telling.
[ http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?STRANGEWEA ]
"Strange Weather deals with a quartet of crack addicts in Miami, just sitting around, while outside, the biggest hurricane of the century is about to hit. The Pixelvision camera roams restlessly through the apartment, focusing nervously on the tiniest details, but never staying in any one spot for very long. Meanwhile, the addicts engage in desultory conversation, or make phone calls, or tell stories about their past experiences. The point is that attention is never in the here and now. It is always shifting around and being refocused elsewhere. Nothing 'happens' in the course of the film, which is to say that what really happens is the empty passage of time." -- Steven Shaviro
[ http://www.film-makerscoop.com/catalog/a.html ]
Another interesting project in this vein is Peggy Ahwesh and Margie Strosser's Pixel Vision tape "Strange Weather" (1993), an astounding 50-minute video study/parody of performance -- playing with our desire to know about illicit activity, as well as our willingness to hear a story -- any story -- the tape chronicles a few days in the household of several young crack heads.
The tape opens on the black fronds of a palm tree waving across a gray sky. The image, as is typical of Pixel Vision, is framed in black, and the high contrast picture, caught in a sea of grain, is achingly beautiful. Another shot moves in closer to the leaves, catching wisps of black lines -- organic and orderly -- against the sky. (Ahwesh and Strosser's stance here is certainly ironic: given the worst equipment, they produce images that are exquisite.) Meanwhile, wind lashes the camera's microphone reminding us of the project's low-tech source. After keying the video's location and letting a radio announce an imminent storm, the camera moves inside and introduces three of the housemates. The camera continues to move, swaying back and forth and around, nervously catching the addicts as they tap and twitch impatiently.
After an amusing scene in the bathroom, the tape moves on to Penny, who begins to tell a story. "So I was in Crack Town one night and I was walking down the street and I had my pocketbook on me and I didn't have any money on me or anything but these guys saw my pocketbook and they jumped me," she begins. Told with a teenager's dialect, a luxurious narcissism, and all the emphasis dramas of sex and drugs can muster, the girl's story is one of several that punctuate the tape. Each one stops the forward flow of the chronicle proper, and while the image registers only the young woman while she speaks, the lure of a story creates an intense desire to hear and know more; thus despite the poverty of the picture, the desire to hear the girl's story acts as a powerful driving force.
[ http://strikingdistance.com/sd9701/c3ij ... llis1.html ]
The fascinating thing about this 50-minute documentary by Peggy Ahwesh and Margie Strosser - about the everyday lives of four Miami crackheads, three women and a man - is the offbeat intimacy they create with their imaginative and resourceful use of a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera. The crackheads are mainly glimpsed goofing off, talking about themselves, and trying to coax money out of family and friends during a severe hurricane.
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader, 25/2/94
Peggy Ahwesh and Margie Strosser's Strange Weather, a nervously amusing treatment of blank generation crack-addicted Floria youth, is a fine example of a specific medium's suitability to specific subject matter. The enlarged pixels of Pixelvision (preferred tool of zero-budget experimenters, those who want to look zero-budget, and other grade-school auteurs) yield raggedly fragmenting and abstracting patterns in various shades of black and white, and offer an ideal home for the POV of the drug-addled. The weather of the title is an approaching hurricane and the metaphoric destructive energy it embodies. The characters spend their time smoking crack or combing the floors for imagined crack. The video ends before the storm hits, giving the piece a sensation of detour, incompleteness - apt to the minds inhabiting the video space.
- Chris Chang, Film Comment, 11-12/94
Experimental filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh mixes domestic movie technology - video, Super-8, Pixelvision - and outré behaviour to disconcerting effect. Strange Weather brings us into very close proximity with Patti and cohorts, who are holed up in a house in South Florida smoking crack cocaine. Hurricane Andrew is brewing off the coast, and they haven't noticed. The Pixelvision camera seems to inhabit their intermittently hilarious world of tall tales, emotional blackmail and languid attention to domestic detail (notably the kitty litter), but we're given every opportunity to wonder about the veracity of what we are seeing and hearing.
- Bill Gosden, Wellington Film Festival 1995 Programme
Strange Weather, made in collaboration with Margie Strosser, is in terms of length and production the most ambitious of Ahwesh's recent works... The austere, largely improvised narrative is based on the experiences of Strosser's sister. It deals with the now perhaps too familiar down-and-out life of drug addicts, but the compelling aspect of the video is that Ahwesh shot the fictionalized story in a freewheeling way as if real life events were being recorded as they happened. This stylistic stamp is reinforced by the filmmakers' use of Pixelvision, a video format developed by the Fisher-Price Corporation for children's cameras... Ahwesh's exploitation of the tension between almost abstract formal decisions and graphic subject matter may give the impression to the naive and unwary that her intimacy with her performers has gotten to the point where proper aesthetic control has been abandoned. Hence, often to her surprise, a certain degree of controversy has stalked Ahwesh. The undeniable psychological dimension in her films, which, to their credit, the films themselves never seem to acknowledge in direct terms (as Ingmar Bergman's films do), is a great source of their power as art.
- John Pruitt, Whitney Biennial 1995
[ http://film.society.tripod.com/nzffs/ah ... eather.htm ][/quote]
Very good quality for such rare stuff (the only problem is that I could not properly inverse-telecine it, so there is some ghosting here and there).
Keep in mind that it was filmed using Pixelvision toy camera.
THE LINK:
Peggy Ahwesh - Strange Weather.avi 
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Peggy Ahwesh - Strange Weather.avi, 506Mb
video: 640x480 00:51:00 29.96fps DivX 1.2Mbps
audio: 48KHz 00:51:00 Stereo 174Kbps mp3
Peggy Ahwesh's works are wonderful indeed! 
I'll start getting it asap. 