Video History Project

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Cecelia Condit

Since the early 1980s Cecelia Condit's work has consistently explored the relationship between traditional femininity and violent sexual crime in videotapes that incorporate live action, appropriated television images, and original music. Professor of Film and Video at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Condit has a background in sculpture, photography, and filmmaking. Condit considers herself a "storyteller, telling and singing songs about women's lives."

Her narrative tapes explore the not-so-average experiences of the "average woman" in a social climate of sublimated violence, fear, and aggression between men and women, and women and society. The real violence in women's lives is made to coincide with fairy tales and princesses, a black-humored twist that conflates the moralizing lesson of fairy tales with the grisly sensationalism of tabloid headlines. The setting for her narratives is consistently Suburbia, Middle America, a land where fairy tale and reality fuse.

"My work centers around the theme of how bizarre events disrupt mundane lives. By contrasting the commonplace with the macabre, humor with the absurd, I address a reality that is both surprisingly believable yet strange enough to belong only to the realm of fiction." Titles by Cecelia Condit: Beneath the Skin Not a Jealous Bone Oh, Rapunzel Possibly in Michigan Why Not A Sparrow Work by Cecelia Condit also appears on: Compilation: Cecelia Condit Videoworks: Volume 1

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"Cecelia Condit." Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2011. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/cecelia-condit.

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Summary

Cecelia Condit is a filmmaker and Professor of Film and Video at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee whose videotapes since the early 1980s examine the relationship between traditional femininity and violent sexual crime, combining live action, appropriated television images, and original music. She has a background in sculpture, photography, and filmmaking; her narrative tapes locate violence in Suburbia, Middle America and juxtapose fairy-tale motifs and princesses with tabloid sensationalism. Titles listed include Beneath the Skin, Not a Jealous Bone, Oh, Rapunzel, Possibly in Michigan, Why Not, and A Sparrow; her work appears on the compilation Cecelia Condit Videoworks: Volume 1.

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Last modified 17 June 2011

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