Mary Goes Round

single channel video & sound work
3 min. 22 sec.
2005

Mary Goes Round explores the hyper mise-en-scene of the 1950's melodrama through a series of parts: setting, camera movement & framing, color, lighting, and the music score. The work focuses on how these components of mise-en-scene merge to suggest a dramatic stillness of hidden desires. Visually, the piece consists of a series of fragmented interior scenes that are interrupted by isolated shots from a woman’s point of view. Each of these P.O.V shots function as involuntary glimpses, in effect creating a discontinuity of events and places. The combination of this structure with an appropriated musical score generates a tenuous and abstract experience of time and space. The work utilizes these elements without traditional drama or story to call upon the viewers’ cinematic history and imagination to determine narrative from within a feminized gaze. Thematically, the work places emphasis on the construction of feminine subjectivity through the claustrophobic and dizzying aspects of light, movement, pattern, and color.

credits:
Director, Camera, Editor, Performer: Julie Orser
Dolly operator: Jon Irving
Music: Appropriated excerpt from Composer Edward Ward, Mary Explains Divorce from The Women, Appropriated excerpt from Composer Bronislau Kaper, Five Eighteen from Invitation