Flat Is Beautiful: The Strange Case of Pixelvision
Film Society’s survey looks back on this curious, fertile episode of media history, showcasing efforts by Almereyda and Benning, as well as Peggy Ahwesh, Cecilia Dougherty, Joe Gibbons, and Eric Saks, among others.
Sadie Benning
USA|
85 minutes
These early pieces, largely recorded in the artist’s bedroom, established Sadie Benning as the wunderkind of the New Queer Cinema.
Michael Almereyda
USA|
79 minutes
“The pixel camera practically forces you to be reckless and original,” once wrote Michael Almereyda, who would use the lo-fi apparatus to memorable effect in The Rocking Horse Winner, his contemporary take on the classic D. H. Lawrence story, and his impressionistic study of a young man, Another Girl, Another Planet.
Peggy Ahwesh
USA|
80 minutes
Ahwesh’s Nocturne is a horror movie stripped down to its barest elements; Ahwesh and Margie Strosser’s Strange Weather is a Warholian riff on reality television assumed by many who first saw it to be a documentary.
USA|
95 minutes
Glass Jaw is Michael O’Reilly’s harrowing chronicle of two injuries; Elisabeth Subrin’s Swallow deftly blends found footage and self-shot material with spoken recollections of a childhood friend’s eating disorder; and Sadie Benning’s Flat Is Beautiful centers on a melancholy tween tomboy grappling with their gender identity in working-class Milwaukee.
Michael Almereyda
1994|
USA|
92 minutes
Nadja is a vampire movie of the most idiosyncratic sort—Bram Stoker by way of Breton. Produced by David Lynch, and staged primarily in modern Manhattan, the film offers a wry update of the old Universal picture Dracula’s Daughter.
Michael Almereyda & Amy Hobby
1995|
USA|
71 minutes
It’s January 1995, cinema’s centenary has commenced, and Michael Almereyda and Amy Hobby are at Sundance with a Pixelvision camera, asking their fellow filmmakers about the future of movies: Are they optimistic, or pessimistic?
Cecilia Dougherty & Leslie Singer
1993|
USA|
52 minutes
Joe-Joe delivers a comically deadpan imagining of Joe Orton, with the ill-fated playwright cast as a leather-clad dyke duo, Joe and Joe.
USA|
84 minutes
Inspired by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer and the cult TV series An American Family, Cecilia Dougherty’s semi-autobiographical Coal Miner’s Granddaughter tracks a woman’s sexual and political awakenings. Plus Tammy Rae Carland’s Jug Town Road, about the artist’s childhood crush on First Daughter Amy Carter.
USA|
60 minutes
Pranks and lampoons abound in these four humorous, sometimes mercilessly satirical shorts from Eric Saks, Joe Gibbons, and Alex Bag.
USA|
103 minutes
One of the most iconic American independent films, Richard Linklater’s Slacker maps Gen X Austin by ambling from vignette to vignette, and includes a famous Pixelvision vignette. Meanwhile, James Benning’s Tabletop, the deepest cut of the entire series, considers the formal character of the camera’s end-of-tape glitch.
Free Screenings & Events
Ben Coonley
2016-2017|
USA|
60 minutes
Ben Coonley recently created a suite of ingenious experiments using two side-by-side PXL 2000s, testing, in the process, the dimensional limits of Pixelvision’s low res properties. These videos will be on view in the Film Society’s amphitheater throughout the week of the series
Join Michael Almereyda, Ben Coonley, and Cecilia Dougherty for a wide-ranging discussion about Pixelvision, moderated by Film Society Programmer at Large Thomas Beard.
“Picture what your kids can do with the new PXL 2000.” So went the 1987 advertising campaign for Fisher-Price’s latest offering, a lightweight plastic camcorder conceived specifically for children. Invented by James Wickstead, the device allowed for ten minutes of footage recorded directly onto a standard audio cassette. Sales proved disappointing; Pixelvision would soon be abandoned by its parent company, and production on new cameras halted after a year. Yet the story of the PXL 2000 was just beginning. Though it failed as a plaything, Pixelvision was taken up by a range of experimental auteurs drawn to its distinctive—grainy, spectral, colorless—textures, including Michael Almereyda, who made several feature-length projects with the toy; and a teenage Sadie Benning, who got one for Christmas from Benning’s filmmaker father James in 1988, and used it to create intimate studies of burgeoning queer identity. Film Society’s survey looks back on this curious, fertile episode of media history, showcasing efforts by Almereyda and Benning, as well as Peggy Ahwesh, Cecilia Dougherty, Joe Gibbons, and Eric Saks, among others. While the works varied notably in approach, such directors found inspired ways to deploy the format, discovering aesthetic possibility in the very limitations of its design. “Pixelvision,” Saks concluded, “is an aberrant art form, underscored by the fact that since the cameras wear out quickly, and are no longer being manufactured, it holds within itself authorized obsolescence. Each time an artist uses a PXL 2000, the whole form edges closer to extinction.”
Organized by Thomas Beard. Special thanks to Vanessa Haroutunian, Harvard Film Archive, UCLA Film & Television Archive, and Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
All screenings will take place in the Francesca Beale Theater unless otherwise noted.
Programmer Thomas Beard on Pixelvision, the “Underappreciated Flipside of 90s Indie Cinema”:
I bought a PXL 2000 on eBay years ago, back when I was in college, but unfortunately I could never get it to work. The Pixelvision camera was kind of legendary, a plastic camcorder for kids put out by Fisher-Price in the late ’80s that recorded its ghostly, low-res images onto a regular audio cassette. As a toy, the PXL 2000 was rather a bust, yanked from the shelves after only a year—they were too expensive, they were temperamental—but the story of Pixelvision doesn’t end there. It had a look like nothing else, a dreamy visual texture, fuzzy as a faded memory, and the format had a surprise second act in the hands of experimental filmmakers, who used the device to shoot some truly remarkable movies, like Michael Almereyda’s Nadja, a wry riff on the vampire picture, or Sadie Benning’s teenage bedroom tapes, which, in my estimation, are among the most moving and imaginative records of queer adolescence ever made.
Over the years there have been a number of one-off Pixelvision screenings, but nothing this comprehensive, and many of the titles aren’t currently available on DVD or Netflix, so if you’re intrigued by the curious afterlife of the PXL 2000 and the challenging, strangely beautiful films it captured, now’s the time to check them out. Think of this series as the underappreciated flipside of ’90s independent cinema.
