Our screening, from the UWM Film Studies Collection’s Queer Media library, highlights three early films by Sadie Benning. Sadie’s work stands apart (including from their father, James Benning) in its DIY, punk rock, stream-of-consciousness storytelling. In this session, we will interrogate the difficulty of accessing their films through screening a VHS copy directly as a prelude to our VHS digitization project. These works, filmed in Benning’s bedroom using available materials on a Fisher-Price PXL 2000, are prime examples of the resulting “Pixelvision” style for which they are known. In tandem with Pixelvision is the difficulty in deciphering the images onscreen and risk of loss while rerecording in another medium. While watching a good-quality VHS release of “A Place Called Lovely,” “It Wasn’t Love,” and “Girlpower,” we aim to demonstrate both the importance of preserving queer voices through media while emphasizing the value of using already existing media for exhibition.
