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Possibly in Michigan

Cecelia Condit

1983 00:12:00 United StatesEnglishColor4:3Video
Tags:
Consumer culture, Feminism, Music

Description

Possibly In Michigan is an operatic fairytale about cannibalism in Middle America. A masked man stalks a woman through a shopping mall and follows her home. In the end, their roles are reversed when the heroine deposits a mysterious Hefty bag at the curb. Like Condit's other video narratives, Possibly In Michigan shows bizarre events disrupting mundane lives. Combining the commonplace with the macabre, humor with the absurd, she constructs a world of divided reality.

"Putting on femininity with a visual and narrative vengeance; Condit's disconcerting irony and sweetly gruesome stories also 'put-on' and undo societal prescriptions and taboos regarding women's options to subjugation by violence or the gaze, letting us see and hear what often remains hidden, behaving with impropriety."

—Patricia Mellencamp, “Uncanny Feminism: The Exquisite Corpses of Cecelia Condit,” Afterimage 14 (September 1986)

This title is also available on Cecelia Condit Videoworks: Volume 1.

About Cecelia Condit

Since the early 1980s Cecelia Condit’s narrative videos have explored the not-so-average experiences of the “average woman” in a social climate of sublimated violence, fear, and misogynist aggression. Her dark-humored works conflate fairy tale morals with the grisly sensationalism of tabloid headlines, incorporating live action, appropriated television images, and original music into frequently operatic narratives. Condit is a Professor Emerita of Film and Video at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

"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."
— Cecelia Condit  

Mary L. Nohl Fellowship, Greater Milwaukee Foundation, 2005