Swallow

Dublin Core

Title

Swallow

Subject

experimental, woman filmmaker, queer, anorexia, depression, body dysmorphia, personality disorders

Description

Gift from filmmaker. I think I wrote a letter of evaluation for Elisabeth at one point and may have acquired many of her films for this reason. Many of our core interests align: feminism, reenactment, women's liberation. Elisabeth wrote an important contribution for the collection I co-edited with Jesse Lerner on fake documentaries, F is for Phony, about her own reenactment practice in her rich and complex film Shulie.

Publisher

Video Data Bank

Date

1995

Abstract

"Subrin's cross-texting Swallow portrays the artist as a young anorexic, bombarded by the contradictory messages of a malign culture. Personality disorders find their formal equivalents in a work that clouds the borders of the bio-pic, by shifting voices, legitimizing accounts, and skillful layerings of social history." -Steve Seid, Curator, Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, CA "For Subrin, as the visual metaphor of silence or speechlessness—evidenced primarily by the repeated use of white-out on the body, text and image—gains prominence in Swallow, it becomes clear that the fragility of female identity in post-feminist America appears, in part, as a failure of language itself." -Tina Wasserman, New Art Examiner, Chicago from elisabethsubrin.com

Elisabeth Subrin’s Swallow, meanwhile, revolves around another kind of psychic and physical breakdown. Deftly blending found footage and self-shot material with spoken recollections of a childhood friend’s eating disorder, Subrin navigates the darker
side of a Free to Be...You and Me upbringing: ‘It was 1975. There was no name for it, but I knew what she was talking about. - Films by Lincoln Center

Elisabeth Subrin’s SWALLOW is based on accounts of eating disorders of her childhood friends and examines a dark aspect of the lives of today’s young women which may cause psychic and physical collapse.” - Viennale Film Festival

Moving Image Item Type Metadata

Original Format

VHS

Duration

28 mins

Director

Elisabeth Subrin

URL

https://brooklyn-cuny.yuja.com/V/Video?v=11719486&node=51535682&a=67726723

Files

Citation

“Swallow,” VHS Activism Archive , accessed July 13, 2025, https://activismvhs.omeka.net/items/show/689.

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