General Hospital/Olympic Women Speed Skating

USA 1980, video, col, sound, 6:00 min

realized by:

Dara Birnbaum

available copies:

Electronic Arts Intermix - EAI:

video, sound

available for rent

Available together with "Kojak/Wang" on the tape "Pop-Pop Video".

synopsis: Copyright Electronic Arts Intermix, New York. See the EAI Online Catalogue for further information about this artist and work

In the dynamic Pop-Pop Video tapes, Birnbaum appropriates standard television genres - the soap opera, sports event, action drama - to deconstruct the idiomatic meaning of TV's structural codes and conventions, such as the intercut and reverse shot.

"General Hospital/Olympic Women Speed Skating" is a fragmented collage that cuts between two sources of off-air television imagery - the TV sports event and the soap opera - to analyze the syntax and gestures of what Birnbaum terms "TV treatment" - in this case, the cross-cut and the reverse shot. The "cross-over" in an Olympic women's speed skating race is juxtaposed with daytime drama General Hospital's "whites" in reverse angle shots. A couple tries to reach an understanding. Skaters continuously return to the starting line. Frustration and exertion combine with originally scored soundtracks of disco, rock and jazz. The female soap opera character's emotional stress, her gestures and rhetoric of paranoia and self-doubt are countered with the pure physical performance of the female sports figures.

cinovid / oVid / Werkleitz Gesellschaft and the authors © 1996-2009