Featuring: Margie Strossmer, Renate Walker, Mandy Ahwesh and Natalka Voslakov.
This film is formed around several scenes of women telling stories to the camera of their sexual history and experience. This material is intercut and juxtaposed with related footage concerning girls and their growing up, memory and the learning process and the received truth of history lessons. This film as a whole makes for an uncomfortable fit between women's personal experience and the official dogma of our culture's history.
The filming style is of the ethno-graphic film without the expert observer and of the home movie without the father.
1985, S8mm, color/so, 21m (18fps), $65
Featuring: Peter and Mandy Ahwesh, Keith Sanborn and The Doomsday Prophet. This film focuses on my niece and nephew as main subjects. As I watched them grow up and followed their interests and childhood behaviors, I was intrigued by the level of violence and aggression that was present in their day-to-day activities. This film is a loosely compiled essay on a variety of themes evoked by the children and inspired by the quality of the footage I shot of them playing, including: street violence and war, the sexual play of adult lovers and a prophecy for the nuclear end.
"This film is Peggy Ahwesh's very unofficial history of conflict as both a product of and a reaction to socialization, bringing together past and present, fictional and personal space, while making connections between kid's play and adult's sexual banter and Pasolini's Pig Pen and street protests." - Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive
1984-1987, S8mm, color/so, 22m, $65
Made with Keith Sanborn. Featuring performances by Jennifer Montgomery, Roman Quanta la Gusta, Scott Shat, Diane Torr and Leslie Singer.
"THE DEADMAN charts the adventures of a nearly naked heroine who leaves the corpse of her dead lover in a country house, goes to a bar and sets in motion a scabrous free-form orgy before returning to her house to die. The film manages to approximate the transgressive poetic prose of Bataille (a mixture of elegance, raunchy defilement and barbaric splendor) while celebrating female sexual desire without the usual patriarchal-porn trimmings." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Exhibition: Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1991; Creteil Int'l Festival of Films by Women; Festival de Nouveau Cinema, Montreal; Melbourne Int'l Film Festival; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Other Cinema, SF.
1989, 16mm, b&w/so, 40m, $125
A film about the riddles of our sexual construction and the complexities of play. "Since the mid-'70s, feminist filmmakers have taken up the gauntlet of visual representation, challenging sexist imagery with new paradigms of difference. One of the wittiest contenders is Ahwesh, whose film, MARTINA'S PLAYHOUSE, premiered at the Collective for Living Cinema. If the unprecedented success of Pee-Wee Herman suggests (let's hope) a potential crisis in masculinity, then MARTINA'S PLAYHOUSE signals that the equally artificial construct of femininity is ready to explode." - Manohla Dargis, The Village Voice
1989, S8mm, color/so, 20m, $60
With Martina Torr and Sonja Mereu.
"... THE SCARY MOVIE, by Peggy Ahwesh, [is an] amazingly complex (and just plain amazing) film informed by a wide range of issues and concerns, including feminism, psychoanalytic theory (especially Jacques Lacan), home-movie aesthetics, film genre conventions, and the notion of self-reflexivity in film. ... [S]he plays with the Freudian concept (filtered through Lacan) of the female's 'lack' of a penis, turning this core issue of psychoanalytic thinking on its head. ... In [this] film it is the male who 'lacks,' men being conspicuously absent, even when the 'narrative' calls for male roles. ... Ahwesh's work ... is notable in the way that it combines subjects of seriousness and gravity with an unparalleled control of the film medium, a disarming wit, and a frankness that catches one by surprise." - Patrick Friel, Indianapolis Museum of Art
1993, 16mm, b&w/so, 9m, $30
By Peggy Ahwesh & Margie Strosser.
"Strange Weather deals with a quartet of crack addicts in Miami, just sitting around, while outside, the biggest hurricane of the century is about to hit. The Pixelvision camera roams restlessly through the apartment, focusing nervously on the tiniest details, but never staying in any one spot for very long. Meanwhile, the addicts engage in desultory conversation, or make phone calls, or tell stories about their past experiences. The point is that attention is never in the here and now. It is always shifting around and being refocused elsewhere. Nothing 'happens' in the course of the film, which is to say that what really happens is the empty passage of time." - Steven Shaviro
1993, VHS, b&w/so, 50m, $20 Home; $200 Other
"The last word in ready-mades, Peggy Ahwesh's THE COLOR OF LOVE ... is a slightly slo-mo, optical reprint of an obviously ill-treated '70s porn movie in which the chemical rot that's already eaten away the edges of the image threaten to censor it entirely. ... An ur-text for Ahwesh's work, THE COLOR OF LOVE is an almost Rose Hobart for the '90s." - Amy Taubin, The Village Voice
Exhibition: MIX NYC: NY Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival, 1994; Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995.
1994, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
"The girls-only party scenes in THE VISION MACHINE have both the ruddy look of overexposed home movies and the richly burnished texture of Renaissance paintings cracking under their veneer. A riff on Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (Ahwesh, with Keith Sanborn's collaboration, inscribes the lyrics of 'Wild Thing' on a warped video version of a roto-relief) and on Buñuel's Viridiana (here the lowlifes invading the manor are women artists), THE VISION MACHINE is an inspired depiction of girls dressing up and acting out, pleased as punch to have taken over the screen." - Amy Taubin, The Village Voice
1997, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 20m, $80
VHS Sale: $20 Home; $150 Other
Director: Peggy Ahwesh; Featuring: Bradley Eros, Anne Kugler and Karen Sullivan; Cinematography: Peggy Ahwesh and Robert Fenz.
A psychological horror film based on fear, disquietude and the anticipation of violence ... among the shadows of the night and the lurid dreams of the imagination, with no clear division between fact and hallucination, between life and death, between dread and desire. Combines plot elements culled from Italian horror films and texts from Acker, Shaviro and de Sade. NOCTURNE finishes a trilogy with THE DEADMAN and THE COLOR OF LOVE.
1998, 16mm, b&w/so, 30m, $90
See film descriptions above.
1989/1993, VHS, b&w/color/so, 29m, $30 Home; $100 Other
See film descriptions above.
1989/1994, VHS, b&w/color/so, 50m, $30 Home; $100 Other