currentinspiration:

“Re-editing footage collected from months of playing Tomb Raider, Ahwesh transforms the video game into a reflection on identity and mortality. Trading the rules of gaming for art making, she brings Tomb Raider’s cinematic aesthetics to the foreground, and shirks the pre-programmed “mission” of its heroine, Lara Croft. Ahwesh acknowledges the intimate relationship between this fictional character and her player. Moving beyond her implicit feminist critique of the problematic female identity, she enlarges the dilemma of Croft’s entrapment to that of the individual in an increasingly artificial world.”

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Voiceovers: Yuko Aramaki, Samuael Topiary, Eva Waniek. Quotes from “The Book of Disquiet,” by Fernando Pessoa, “The Female Man,” by Joanna Russ, and Sun Ra. Thanks: Jon Di Benedetto, Su Friedrich, Keith Sanborn, Samuael Topiary, Karim Ghawagi, The White Box Gallery, Stella’s Tombraider site. Funding: New York State Council on the Arts. - Source

We watched and discussed Peggy Ahwesh’s She Puppet in my seminar today, drawing comparisons with the content of the lecture I (annoyingly) managed to miss on Monday, which looked into issues of femininity, modernity and technology in C20th films from Metropolis to Blade Runner. It’s been the sort of week I’ve desperately needed; a reminder of why I love my subject. Okay, okay, I hear you people at the back - so it’s arguably been a week of film (and games?) studies rather than art history, but I chose my degree for the sake of an interest in visual culture, and that’s what I’ve gotten to look at this week, so shush.

From Senses of Cinema (including quite a claim at the end!): ”There is nothing real or realistic about the animated image of Lara Croft, and yet, through the repetitive acts of violence and self-destruction, she becomes real and we find ourselves believing in her on the very basis of her being obsessively violated. In many ways She Puppet is the most succinct and powerful essay on the position of women in the field of cinematic vision since Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”