Superman and Wonderwoman: Filmperformance 1980-82

Abstract

This performance piece deals with the various contents and visual means of cinema the myths of cinema and our relationships to them, kitsch and cliche but also the vitality and beauty of popular culture. We use found footage from a screen test, a commercial, a documentary (which shows desperate soldiers), a professional trailer from From Here to Eternity, as well as footage from our own films, including our home movies, in turn with several series of slides, other more visually experimental film pieces, and live action scenes with the two of us. Scenarios of the latter include: Superman and Wonderwoman, Frankenstein's Monsters, Kiss, and Battle with Shaving Cream. We work with single, double, and three-screen projection, changing the size of the image from small to very large, and with synchronized sound on tape. There is no continuous story or plot; instead the different elements refer to each other in various ways. There is the theme of the erotic: the would-be Marilyn of the fifties posing simultaneously on three screens, two girls posing for an amateur blue movie, the clean and self-confined Superman and Wonderwoman dancing as life-size cardboard jumping jacks, the classical love scene in From Here to Eternity, images of ourselves naked in footage from our home movies, and a long live kiss in front of the audience, our backs to the screen. There is also a thematic relationship between the documentary and the trailer, between the crying soldiers as an unofficial image of war and the dying hero as the official clich6. And there is the relationship between the documentary and the home movie which shows the schizophrenia of everyday life, of being