Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art and Block Cinema (Venue Partner)
40 Arts Circle Drive
Northwestern University
847 491 4000
This event has passed.
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Hypnotist
- When
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Thursday Nov 5, 2009 (7–9:30pm)
- Where
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Directions: On the south end of Northwestern University's campus, just off Sheridan Road. Free parking at NU after 4 pm weekdays and all day weekends. Near the CTA Purple Line Davis and Foster stops and the Metra Davis stop.
- Price
- Links
Tonight’s program juxtaposes Anna Biller’s short films with the work of two of her teachers, the prominent Los Angeles-based artists, Morgan Fisher and Paul McCarthy. All of the films share an interest in politics and the body. Fisher’s work Standard Gauge (1984) investigates film as a perceptual and mechanical phenomenon. Paul McCarthy’s WGG Test (2003) takes one of the popular movie genres of recent years, the slasher film, to even more outrageous extremes. Biller’s first film, Three Examples of Myself as Queen (1994) is a triptych of expressions of female power, in which Biller plays a depressed monarch, a queen bee, and a teenager who takes revenge against a naughty group of partiers. Fairy Ballet (2001) is an adaptation of a French fairy tale, and The Hypnotist (2001) is an homage to the hypnosis-obsessed dramas of Hollywood’s golden age. The crowning achievement may be A Visit from the Incubus (2001), a horror western musical. Biller plays Lucy, a woman tormented by nocturnal visits from a demon. Lucy escapes and becomes a saloon singer, only to face her nemesis in a sing-off. With Anna Biller in person.
