Invoking Eve’s temptation and fall from grace with recurring images of the garden, the serpent, and the apple, Condit provides a look at the trouble beneath the surface in a modern-day suburban paradise. As a housewife struggling to come to terms with the conflicting demands placed on her as a wife, mother, career-woman, and daughter, Anne finds she is divided against herself; her identity is a territory occupied by everyone’s needs but her own. Condit’s characteristic sing-song chants and use of the absurd underscore a wry sense of tragedy, as a picture of suburban bliss gone sour emerges.
Suburbs of Eden
Cecelia Condit
1992 00:15:00 United StatesEnglishColorMono4:3VideoDescription
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