Sadie Benning: Pixel Persona

Jed Smith – 2006-02-20
Notes for a Film W6
Sadie Benning

The videos of Sadie Benning are an innovative anomaly that creates a unique language of expression. To some extent this innovation is dictated by her technological medium, the Pixelvision camera. As her working style evolved, it began to intersect with the precepts of the autoethnographical form of cinematic expression, though she was certainly not consciously creating her work within the confines of this definition.

Benning’s medium of the PXL-2000 Pixelvision camera suites itself very well to her visual style of self-representation. Because of the low resolution and “gutterboxing” of the format, a preponderance of macro framing is necessitated. This contributes to an intensely personal and subjective feel in her videos. In her first work, Me and Rubyfruit, the medium was very apparent also in the distinct in-camera edits of the Pixelvision camera, which served to accentuate each shot as an individual statement, as well as to make very apparent the medium itself in the content. This method of editing, combined with the confiding voiceover, contributed to a very personal style of self-portrayal. This is a very telling example of how using a medium can be exploited to not only more effectively convey a message, but to innovate a new form and language to convey new content.

Even while being personal, the videos of Benning succeed in communicating the social and cultural plight of being a lesbian in upper middle class white America in such a way that the target audience can identify intensely with the subject matter. After our discussion of autoethnography and Ngozi Onwurah, the precise definition of the term was still quite fuzzy in my mind. The excerpt from Experimental Ethnography served to elucidate the many and varied meanings, ideas, and definitions behind this term. Russel perceptively distinguishes between autobiography and autoethnography: “Autobiography becomes ethnographic at the point where the film or videomaker understands his or her personal history to be implicated in larger social formations and historical processes. … Autoethnography is a vehicle and a strategy for challenging imposed forms of identity and exploring the discursive possibilities of inauthentic subjectivities” (Russel 276). This quote quite clearly defines a term which seems to be adaptable to describe some similar qualities of some work which is quite disparate in some respects, notably, Su Friedrich and Sadie Benning.

In the earlier work of Benning such as Me and Rubyfruit, while certainly challenging the notion of her own identity as a lesbian teenager, she does not address herself in the context of larger social formations or probe the expressive possibilities of multiple inauthentic subjectivities as much as in her later work. As Benning’s style evolved, and she gained the capability to edit out of camera and edit audio elements apart from the in-camera sync-sound, she began to experiment with and challenge the conventional portrayal of self. In It Wasn’t Love, this experimentation is especially evident. Benning goes so far as to adopt the persona of an overtly masculine man, complete with goatee, cane, and cigar. This usage of a persona does not detract from her exploration of her own identity and seemingly becomes a comment on the impossibility of veritable autobiography. However, the persona that is acted out could be seen as one aspect of her own personality. This usage is very much in line with the non-essentialist, discursive, shifting, and fragmented views of identity inherent in autoethnography (Russel 276).

Benning’s work is particularly striking to me because of her age when creating it. Only 15 when she made Me and Rubyfruit, it nevertheless conveys a very mature and intelligent portrayal of her own identity. To some extent I think her aptitude for the visual and auditory medium could be explained by the professional occupation of her father as a filmmaker himself, but her stylistic innovation and uniqueness speak for themselves. She wasn’t trying to imitate anyone, and found a new way to express what she had to say. I would be pleased if I could use purposeful naiveté to such innovative effect.

Works Cited:
Russel, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Duke University Press, 1999.
Me and Rubyfruit. Sadie Benning, 1990. Video, sound, B&W.
It Wasn’t Love. Sadie Benning, 1992. Video, sound, B&W.