Derek Jarman's Blue

Okay. The film's actually 76 minutes of nothing but a blue screen. It's a deep, dark, rich shade of blue — but it's the only visual image you're going to see. The movie, the "action," takes place on the soundtrack. That's where Jarman, the dying wunderkind of modern English cinema, unleashes an audacious barrage of narrative and music detailing his losing battle against the AIDS virus. It's a freewheeling mix of controlled anger, mocking humor, surreal visions and genuine melancholy, as Jarman confronts his impending death. Blue not only works, it works brilliantly. So don't be scared by either its experimental structure or subject matter. Blue is a piece of visual music that soars.

Television Families

The words “family” and “television” have been hammered together so often that they practically define each other. The image of the family as presented on TV has produced an ideological debate more explosive than one of McGyver’s bombs. On the tube, the traditional dividing line between reality and fantasy has dissolved into a post-modernist haze of confusion. Dan Quayle is still debating Murphy Brown, a small theater group in San Francisco performs episodes of The Brady Bunch and the name Al Bundy has become a verb.

With so much heat, you’d expect to find a fire. But the standard TV portrayal of families is so marginal that it barely sparks with the dying flicker of a disused Bic. It’s a one-dimensional fantasy, whether it be Ozzie and Harriet’s pipedream or Murphy Brown’s miraculously stress-free motherhood. It’s all high concept and low reality.

“TV is either way behind the curve or way ahead of it,” says Nancy Robinson, publicity manager for the Independent Television Service. ITVS is a media organization affiliated with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and it’s currently touring the country with its seven-part series Television Families. The Wexner Center for the Arts is one of eight selected locations for screenings of the program which shows here September 8, 10 and 17.

“We are a generation that has been weaned on television,” continues Robinson. “Its influence is inescapable.”

But it isn’t unalterable, as demonstrated by the seven iconoclastic films presented in Television Families. The works range from satiric exercises in suburban bad taste to thick slices of real life, but all share a determined desire to reveal aspects of family life that extend beyond the myopic vision of the prime time world.

Some of the filmmakers whose work is included in Television Families are already well established on the independent market. Dottie Gets Spanked by Todd Haynes, whose feature film Poison propelled him to the forefront of the New Queer Cinema movement. African-American culture and a feminist viewpoint are combined in the comedy MOTV (My Own TV) by Ayoka Chenzira, while Jon Moritsugu deliriously demolishes the myths about the model Asian-American family in Terminal USA. An Appalachian legacy of pain and hope underlies the protracted drinking bout of Night Ride, while the crazy nature of TV itself erupts in A Psychic Mom, when Doris Day meets the supernatural.

If TV is a reflection of society, “then this is the funhouse mirror,” explains Robinson. Even more importantly, it’s a chance to see TV through something other than the rose-colored monocle worn by the commercial tube.

Beth B’s Under Lock and Key

In the doorway of the gallery is a large black box. Its brutal bulk is intensely intimidating.

It should be.

The box is actually four isolation cells. Inside each cell is a metal slab, a drain hole and a single, bare bulb. Through a speaker hidden in the cell’s ceiling, excerpts are played from convict-author Jack Henry Abbot’s book In the Belly of the Beast.

Behind the cell block, at the back of the gallery, are two large, rear-projection screens. On the right, an actor plays serial killer Ted Bundy, using material culled from interviews before Bundy’s execution. On the left, people who have been assaulted read letters that they have written to their attackers.

The alternating images are periodically joined together in blurred abstractions of trees. They form slow streaks across the screen. It’s as if they were a visualization of a scream.

This is the cold, dark heart of Under Lock and Key, Beth B’s multimedia installation at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The exhibit is harsh, didactic and unrelenting. It’s also a direct confrontation with evil.

The exhibit has a raw, visceral effect: it’s crudely dramatic and extremely uncomfortable.

But Beth B’s work is never comfortable. She is the punk poet of the primal scream.

She is best known as a filmmaker, gaining her initial notoriety at the end of the ‘70s with the Super-8 movies G-Man, The Offenders, and Black Box. The films are a crazy quilt of rambling narratives, primitive techniques and taboo violations – an odd mishmash of Franz Kafka, Amnesty International reports on torture and post-Oedipal loathing.

The punk “no-wave” movement was in full gear at that time and the films were tremendously popular, playing all over New York’s lower East Side. The Offenders was presented as a regular serial at Max’s Kansas City – the musical mecca of punkdom. Despite the films’ venomous anti-aesthetic approach, they found their way into such venues as the Contemporary Art Museum of Chicago.

And the films kept coming. There are her features – Vortex, Salvation! and the soon-to-be-released Two Small Bodies. Not to mention her music videos, with such catchy titles as Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight.

But Beth B is a painter and printmaker (and the daughter of painter Ida Applebroog), as well as a filmmaker. Under Lock and Key unites her diverse media in a single, focused context.

The early films provide crucial references to her current exhibit. Black Box is about a man who is kidnapped, stripped, hung upside down and eventually placed within a torture chamber based upon devises used by the Chilean secret police. Another film, Letters to Dad, is a series of tight close-ups of performers delivering a dead-pan reading of letters written to Jim Jones by his followers, just before he ordered them to commit mass suicide.

Under Lock and Key carries a tremendous amount of psychic baggage – the soul-destroying weight of a faltering culture. It presents the various kinds of force and violence that are used on the battle fronts of class, racial and sexual warfare. Ironically, it forces itself upon the viewer.

And it succeeds in its intentions: it opens the door to the prison-like psyche of society’s victims.