May 4th, 2014
@ UT Union Theater (map)
8pm: Coal Miner’s Daughter
9:30pm: Imitations of Life
Free!
Like Chronicle of a Summer but can’t stand anthropology?
Like An American Family but wish they used that microphone a little better?
Take a bite out of Cecilia Dougherty’s unsung masterpiece — Coal Miner’s Granddaughter (1991).
Shot on Pixelvision. Scored by the She Devils. Queer as hell and all totally true.
Can’t shake the feeling that television has replaced your own memories?
Interested in psychoanalysis but would rather watch a movie than read Freud or Lacan?
Take a warped tour of human memory and life distilled through a century of film and video in Mike Hoolboom’s Imitations of Life (2003).
Eagerly brought to you by Texas Parents Association. – Mad Stork Cinema
Coal Miner’s Granddaughter by Cecilia Dougherty
80 min / digital / sound / 1991
Starring Leslie Singer, Didi Dunphy, Kevin Killian, Glen Helfand, Amanda Hendricks, Clancy Cavnar, Ramon Charruca, Valerie Soe, and Claire Trepanier.
Music by the She Devils, and by Mermaid Tattoo
Coal Miner’s Granddaughter is a feature length video, is somewhat autobiographical, and is chiefly shot using a Fisher Price pixel camcorder. This video piece was inspired by two sources: Chronique d’une ete, the 1960 documentary masterpiece by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, and the 1970s PBS series An American Family, produced by Craig Gilbert.
My video uses mostly improvised dialogue with specific scene direction, combined with a documentary style of shooting to create a narrative about a young working class woman coming out queer in the 1970s. The video is an experiment in improvised narrative construction and an examination of the difference between fiction and documentary. – C.D.
Imitations of Life by Mike Hoolboom
70 minutes / digital / sound / 2003
Imitations of Life is a psychoanalytic essay in 10 parts, culling found footage from early cinema, Hollywood films, educational and scientific documentaries, home movies, television shows, and Hoolboom’s own work, layered into a Freudian trip through images that stand in for childhood memories. Each chapter strikes a different tone through the reanimation of varying narratives and filmic tropes; in its entirety, Imitations is a lyrical synthesis of cinema’s possible pasts and futures, and a meditation on how we reflect ourselves through mirrors and screens.