Sex, Power, and Money: Films by Beth B
After defining the No Wave film movement of the New York underground of the 1970s and ’80s, Beth B emerged in the 1990s as a provocative multi-disciplinary artist, creating a series of confrontational visual works that explore the dynamics of sex, power, and money. Beth B’s stylistically adventurous work seduces the eye even as it shocks the mind with an emotional nakedness seldom found in contemporary cinema. With every film, Beth B challenges the viewer to hold her cinematic gaze as she explores themes of sexual desire, the justice system, gender identity, the Vietnam War, or the female body. Derived primarily from analog video elements, the films in this collection have been restored under the filmmaker’s supervision.
The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight
Hairspray, skin and eyeliner on full display as a gang of leather-clad, powerful women take over a traditionally male domain. Beth B's music video for the Arthur Baker-produced New York City club hit from 1984 deemed to have been too racy for New York Hot Tracks. It was banned at the time and found its way into the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection instead. (1983, 4 minutes)
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Belladonna
A number of somber talking heads frankly describe their most personal and perverse attitudes on sex, violence and other family matters. The actors are reciting lines from horrifying, but authentic texts drawn from the words of Joel Steinberg, the New York lawyer convicted of murdering his child in Greenwich Village; excerpts from Sigmund Freud’s essay "A Child is Being Beaten"; and texts by survivors of Dr. Josef Mengele's medical experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp. A disturbing composite-drawing of the face of violence in our society, establishing its linkages to family, culture and, ultimately, social organization. (1989, 12min)
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Stigmata
A confessional and emotional documentary about drug abuse and people caught in its repetitive cycles, STIGMATA consists of six individuals of varying socio-economic backgrounds retracing their histories from childhood, through their dysfunctional family relationships and individual crises, all the way from addiction to recovery and revelations. Beth B re-enters these abusive and painful pasts, guiding the viewer through their struggle that re-emerges in newly found hope, optimism, and confidence to continue their lives as much healthier individuals. (1991, 40 minutes)
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Thanatopsis
In collaboration with legendary downtown performance artist/musician Lydia Lunch, Beth B creates a chilling yet poetic vision of despairing nihilism (literally, a "meditation on death"). In a hypnotic narrative, a beautiful young woman negotiates the banalities of life. In a mesmerizing voiceover which she composed, Lydia Lunch repeats "Annie get your gun," a warning of inevitable destruction. (1991, 12 minutes)
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Amnesia
Originally conceived as a project co-produced by the Whitney Museum and the American Center in Paris and aired on MTV, AMNESIA is a one-minute video that compresses with an economy of time and textual editing a direct assault on the languages of hate and intolerance. We hear spoken, "They spread disease. They smell bad. They take our jobs." The hate conveyed through the invectives (along with Europe’s fascist past) is a reminder of the collective hysteria that can always recur in the language and institution of racism and violence. (1993, 1 minute)
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Under Lock and Key
Speaking to the entrapment we feel when caught in the violence of being attacked and of the attacker himself caught in the web of his own imagined powers and fears and eventual incarceration, the work exposes the perpetrators of violence by revealing their words and the words of their victims. The work creates a dialogue and intersection between the multiple characters as we enter into the experience of violence and the prisons that we live in from our own experiences of abuse and pain. (1994, 31 minutes)
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Visiting Desire
An exciting, playful and amusing psychological experiment in New York City in the mid-'90s. Bringing together a group of total strangers, locking them in a bedroom with cameras for five days, they were encouraged to act out their fantasies and desires. In this twisted version of Big Brother, the diverse group includes a black man, a white skinhead, a dominatrix, a dancer, a transexual and No Wave icon Lydia Lunch. (1995, 70 minutes)
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Hysteria
A stark portrait of women and their relationships to their bodies, oftentimes self-abnegating, the women speak about the binds that tie them to distorted perceptions of self. As a mirror image of our cultural pressures on women, the film challenges accepted views of truth and falsehood, reality and delusion, with an attentiveness to social and psychic history. (2001, 7 minutes)
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Voyeur
An evocative portraits of people having orgasms, lingering on the silent classical face of ecstasy. (2017, 6 minutes)
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High Heel Nights
Intimate portraits of gay artists and drag performers talking about gender, identity, and all the fine lines around it. The film is an important reminder that for us today drag queen performances are accepted in the mainstream, however there was a time when it was strictly underground. (1994, 11 minutes)
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Out of Sight, Out of Mind
As an intense study of the physical, psychological and social breakdown of the human condition, the documentary questions a system that has lost its aspiration to reform while adding the television docudrama style of the late-20th century that drives our knowledge of accepted views of truth and morality. The video mixes historical newsreel footage of bizarre daredevils intercut with contemporary images of violence and television news footage about the real-life story of Eric Smith, a thirteen-year-old boy who killed a four-year-old child. He was tried as an adult and placed in prison instead of being put in a mental institution for treatment. (1995, 6 minutes)
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Breathe In, Breathe Out
The generation gap is difficult enough to bridge on its own-add a father's service in Vietnam and the gap gets even wider. Following three veterans and their grown children back to the land where they witnessed incredible carnage as soldiers, director Beth B investigates "what we pass on from one generation to the next" in the hope that the experience will help both fathers and children come to grips with the war and each other. In doing so, she provides proof that the trauma of war does not end when peace begins. —Harvard Film Archives (2001, 70 minutes)
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Voices Unheard
In this disturbing documentary about juvenile sex offenders, Beth B uses interviews with the offenders and with officials who work with them, on the subjects of sex, abuse, family and the legacy of abuse, to dismantle taboos. Exploring the challenges of integrating these youths back into society, she films a group which brings offenders and their victims face to face so they can try to reunite, understand what they did and how the act affected their victims. For the victims, forgiveness is probably the hardest way out from trauma. (1997, 58 minutes)
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