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Mary Filippo's work primarily focuses on the self and its relationship to inequality.
"Experimental filmmaker Mary Filippo tackles issues of work, class, and gender roles in her meticulously constructed films. Her films are visually captivating, quirkily ironic, thoughtful, and provocative." — Women Make Movies
She initially studied filmmaking with Marjorie Keller at the University of Rhode Island. She also studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, taking classes with George Landow, P. Adams Sitney, and B. Ruby Rich. Over the following two decades, Filippo crafted three painstakingly made 16mm experimental films: PEACE O'MIND, WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, and FEEL THE FEAR. All are distributed by the Film-Makers' Cooperative and boldly confront issues of gender and class.
In Peace O' Mind (1983), the characters try to stay safe at home but become isolated and entrapped there. Images of a domestic space connect with images of poverty "in the backyard" of this space. This suggests that knowing about and hiding from this deprivation has physically and mentally entrapped the characters in their private, isolated, and disturbed spaces.
In Who Do You Think You Are (1986), the main character, a filmmaker, investigates her own cigarette smoking habit while wishing she could make a film about injustice. In other words, she wishes to do something heroic. She has been seduced by the image of the cigarette-smoking hero, but an image is only an image.
With Feel the Fear (1990, 24 minutes), Filippo links images and ideas about television viewing, self-help therapy, alcohol use, acting, mimicry, and social responsibility with metaphoric and formal similarities to imitate cause-and-effect connections. However, the suggested causal logic doesn't hold up and becomes increasingly skewed. The film's structure acts as a metaphor for the contradictions of the culture in which it was made.
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WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE
1987 / b&w / sound / single screen / 10' 00 / 35 € distribution: 16mm |