Video

The Act Of Seeing With Another Eye

Janine Marchessault

1990, 27:00 minutes, colour, English

TAPECODE 055.02

An historical romance - rendered with documentary authenticity - and a contemporary melodrama come to overlap. Their fragmented forms blend together to construct one narrative: the story of a woman obsessed with a man's desire for another woman. The Act Of Seeing With Another Eye can be read as an ironic comment on Stan Brakhage's film 'The Act Of Seeing With One's Own Eyes'. Whereas in Brakhage's film the camera eye is transformed by the artist's eye / I, this videotape explores just the opposite, it explores the historical determination of vision and identity. The ramifications of this determination become apparent in the difficulties women experience in writing their own histories, in attempting to define themselves without recourse to official history and stable patriarchal constructions of femininity.

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Critical Writing

Subjects on the Threshold: Problems with the Pronouns
by Renee Baert. Parachute, Winter 1993, no. 69.
Janine Marchessault
by Kim Derko. C Magazine, Summer 1990, no. 26.
Fine local product deserves new and improved exhibition: Best of 1990
by Cameron Bailey. NOW, Jan. 3, 1990, v. 10, no. 17.