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Clip description
You can watch Cheap Blonde here in its entirety. This experimental film rearranges the same sentence 22 times: ‘A famous filmmaker said: “Cinema is the history of men filming women”’, while deconstructing the video image of a woman bathing in a waterfall.
Curator’s notes
Both the sentence about men filming women, and the choice of a tacky trade fair image of a woman in a waterfall, tap into feminist film theory’s discussions around the male ‘gaze’ of cinema.
Initially, both words and image, at least in terms of verbal and cinematic logic, make sense. Over five minutes, Cheap Blonde undermines this logic. A voice-over continually repeats and reorders the sentence. The editing at first seems arbitrary, then increasingly reveals the constructed nature of the image. The slim illusion of the woman’s environment is broken by switching backdrops, from waterfall to colour bars, to visual noise. The image switches from filling the screen to appearing on multiple television screens. It is rewound and fast-forwarded and increasingly magnified close-ups reveal the video interlace. The narrator is also clearly a construct, a robotic voice that starts out ‘male’ and switches to ‘female’ part way through, further complicating the idea of whose gaze the film might represent.
As with many experimental films, Cheap Blonde invites its audience to be active. The film’s key qualities are disjointedness and absurdity, yet it activates our instincts when confronted with verbal or cinematic language to look for and construct meaning. In this respect, it will be a different film for those audience members with prior knowledge of the cultural histories it evokes.
