- Description:
- BluRay - Multi-Zone. viewing copy. 2 videodiscs of 2.
24 fps
- Notes:
- 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.
Titles
+ Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight, The
- Director:
- B, Beth
- Production Co:
- B Movies
- Running Time:
- Short. 4 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - DTS-HD Master Audio
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 1983
- Genre:
- Experimental / Avant Garde, Female Directors, Music Video
- Notes:
- As a gang of leather-clad, powerful women take over a traditionally male domain, hairspray, skin, and eyeliner are on full display in 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 and banned at the time, it was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art.
+ Belladonna
- Director:
- B, Beth & Applebroog, Ida
- Running Time:
- Short. 12 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - DTS-HD Master Audio
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 1989
- Language:
- English
- Genre:
- Experimental / Avant Garde, Female Directors
- Notes:
- Co-directed with artist Ida Applebroog, this is a disturbing composite-drawing of the face of violence in our society, establishing its linkages to family, culture, and, ultimately, social organization. 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.
+ Stigmata
- Director:
- B, Beth
- Running Time:
- Short. 38 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - DTS-HD Master Audio
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 1991
- Language:
- English with optional English subtitles
- Genre:
- Documentary, Female Directors
- Notes:
- 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 and reemergence in newly found hope, optimism, and confidence to continue their lives as much healthier individuals.
+ Thanatopsis
- Director:
- B, Beth
- Running Time:
- Short. 11 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - DTS-HD Master Audio
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 1991
- Language:
- English, with optional English subtitles
- Genre:
- Experimental / Avant Garde, Female Directors
- Notes:
- 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 that she composed, Lydia Lunch repeats, “Annie get your gun,” a warning of inevitable destruction.
+ Amnesia
- Director:
- B, Beth
- Production Co:
- B Movies
- Running Time:
- Short. 2 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - DTS-HD Master Audio
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 1992
- Language:
- English, with optional English subtitles
- Genre:
- Experimental / Avant Garde, Female Directors
- Notes:
- 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.
+ Under Lock and Key
- Director:
- B, Beth
- Production Co:
- B Movies
- Running Time:
- Short. 30 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - DTS-HD Master Audio
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 1993
- Language:
- English, with optional English subtitles
- Genre:
- Experimental / Avant Garde, Female Directors
- Notes:
- Speaking to the entrapment we feel when caught in the violence of being attacked—and that of the attacker himself, caught in the web of his own imagined powers and fears and eventual incarceration—Under Lock and Key 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 due to our own experiences of abuse and pain. The film is composed of excerpts from the book In the Belly of the Beast, Jack Henry Abbott’s searing reflection on life spent in prison; individuals speaking to their undisclosed attackers; and actor Clark Gregg reciting excerpts from an interview with serial killer Ted Bundy.
+ Visiting Desire
- Director:
- B, Beth
- Running Time:
- Feature. 63 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - DTS-HD Master Audio
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 1996
- Language:
- English, with optional English subtitles
- Genre:
- Documentary, Female Directors
- Notes:
- Interested in exploring the boundaries of an individual and society itself, Visiting Desire creates an exciting, playful, and amusing psychological experiment in New York City in the mid-1990s. Bringing together a group of total strangers and 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 transgender person, and No Wave icon Lydia Lunch.
+ Hysteria
- Director:
- B, Beth
- Running Time:
- Short. 4 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - DTS-HD Master Audio
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 2001
- Language:
- English, with optional English subtitles
- Genre:
- Experimental / Avant Garde, Documentary, Female Directors
- Notes:
- Hysteria is a stark portrait of women and their relationships to their bodies. Oftentimes self-abnegating, the women speak about the ties that bind 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.
+ Voyeur
- Director:
- B, Beth
- Running Time:
- Short. 6 minutes
- Sound:
- silent - no soundtrack
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 2017
- Genre:
- Experimental / Avant Garde, Documentary, Female Directors
- Notes:
- Voyeur features evocative portraits of people having orgasms, lingering on the silent classical face of ecstasy.
+ High Heel Nights
- Director:
- B, Beth
- Running Time:
- Short. 11 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - DTS-HD Master Audio
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 1994
- Language:
- English
Closed Captioned
- Genre:
- Documentary, Female Directors
- Notes:
- Intimate portraits of gay artists and drag performers talking about gender, identity, and all the fine lines around them. The film is an important reminder that, for us today, drag-queen performances are accepted in the mainstream, but there was a time when it was strictly underground.
+ Out of Sight, Out of Mind
- Alternate Title:
- Out of Sight/Out of Mind
- Director:
- B, Beth
- Running Time:
- Short. 6 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - DTS-HD Master Audio
- Color:
- color and b/w
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 1995
- Language:
- English, with optional English subtitles
- Genre:
- Experimental / Avant Garde, Female Directors
- Notes:
- As an intense study of the physical, psychological, and social breakdown of the human condition, this documentary questions a system that has lost its aspiration to reform while employing the television-docudrama style of the late-20th century that drives our knowledge of accepted views of truth and morality. The video intercuts historical newsreel footage of bizarre daredevils with contemporary images of violence and television news footage about the real-life story of Eric Smith, a 13-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.
+ Breathe In, Breathe Out
- Alternate Title:
- Breathe In/Breathe Out
- Director:
- B, Beth
- Running Time:
- Feature. 71 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - DTS-HD Master Audio
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 2001
- Language:
- English, with optional English subtitles
- Genre:
- Documentary, Female Directors, Television Production
- Notes:
- Bravely bringing three severely traumatized Vietnam War veterans and their adult children back to Vietnam, the place of their trauma, director Beth B explores rebirth and the reconciliation process. Reflections of their lives before, during, and after the war are now challenged with a new understanding of Vietnam, its people and places, once seen and preserved in their memory, as pure horror. Using raw, intense, and often revelatory scenes of the journey, captured in a vérité style, and braiding them with intimate, one-on-one interviews shot in a traditional essayistic format, this documentary takes the Veterans, their families, and the viewer on the healing road to confront the troubled past.
+ Voices Unheard
- Director:
- B, Beth
- Running Time:
- Feature. 57 minutes
- Sound:
- sound - DTS-HD Master Audio
- Color:
- color
- Country:
- USA
- Year:
- 1997
- Language:
- English, with optional English subtitles
- Genre:
- Documentary, Female Directors
- Notes:
- 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 that brings offenders and their victims face to face so they can try to reunite and understand what they did and how the act affected their victims. For the victims, forgiveness is probably the hardest way out from trauma.