Saddle Sores

Dublin Core

Title

Saddle Sores

Subject

feminist, woman filmmaker, experimental documentary, sexuality,

Description

Gift from filmmaker. Vanalyne is a friend and colleague. She was a subject of my documentary Women of Vision and would have given this to me to use for b-roll and teaching. Here is the interview I conducted with her for that project.

She also attended, along with about 30 or more media feminists, a research meeting I recorded for what would become Women of Vision. Digitized versions of the VHS tapes of the Chicago research meeting can be found on my vimeo page.

Date

1999

Abstract

Video artist meets a handsome and enigmatic Marlboro Man; video artist gets a sexually transmitted disease. Vanalyne Green reworks the sex-education film to take a critical look at cherished stereotypes about romance, the American West, and cowboys. (MUBI)

Chicagoan Vanalyne Green’s 20-minute video (1998), about contracting herpes from a Wyoming cowboy, includes many film clips, photographs, printed titles, western musical favorites, conversations with and responses from friends (as well as one lab technician), and confessions (both on-screen and off). This is every bit as jokey and as analytical as Green’s longer and earlier A Spy in the House That Ruth Built, about her sexual attraction to baseball players, but the narration here is much more self-accusing—about her romanticism regarding cowboys, about how she let herself get herpes, and about the shame she felt as a consequence—which makes the relentlessly bantering tone a lot more unsettling and challenging. --Jonathan Rosenbaum