Short Description "From its initial visual and sonoric opposition between what also might be called public and private views of the female body, the tape alternated between repeated images of two of the women (Zando and Anstey, still dressed in their vintage gowns, as they enter a room, primp, and eventually kiss and embrace) and the televised footage of Dwyer committing the act of suicide....The tape combines in different ways the supposedly "public" act of Dwyer's suicide and the supposedly "private" seduction of two women in a room, all the while undoing any such easy opposition between private and public, subject and object of the look, or voyeurism and exhibitionism.
Judith Mayne, "Julie Zando's Primal Scenes and Lesbian Representation," Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol 15(1), pp.15-22
Bud Dwyer was a government official who called a press conference and shot himself in front of TV cameras. The very last words of the video, which play over an image of Anstey brushing her hair superimposed over Dwyer lifting the gun and putting it in his mouth, are, "Hey Bud. Bud. Don't."
Artists: Julie Zando, Director. Josephine Anstey, Performer
Video: 5 minutes, b&w & color, sound, 1987
Available from:
Electronic Arts Intermix and
The Video Data Bank
Permanent Exhibitions:
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Reviewed in:
Liz Kotz, "Anything but Idyllic: Lesbian Filmmaking in the 1980s and 1990s," Sisters, Sexperts, Queers: Beyond the Lesbian Nation, ed. Arlene Stein, Plume, 1993
Judith Mayne, Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture, University of Minnesota Press, 2000
Michael Renov (Editor), Erika Suderburg (Editor), Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, University of Minnesota Press, 1995