'Possibly in Michigan': awesome creepy new wave video art cannibal opera from 1983

May 8, 2015 at 7:16 am


Drop everything if you've never seen this work of  video art from 1983 by Cecelia Condit. Possibly in Michigan is twelve minutes long, and wow, it's really something.

Possibly in Michigan from FVANG on Vimeo.


The full description of the piece is as follows:

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. Music: Karen Skladany. With: Jill Sands, Karen Skladany, Bill Blume, Amy Krick, Jeff Chiplis. Editor: David Narosny. Sound Mixing: Joel Solloway. Special Effects: John Barak.

"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)