Cecilia Dougherty
Videography
Video Clips Kevin and Cedar |
My Failure to Assimilate |
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My Failure to Assimilate is an essay and a documentary examining the failure of society to accept feminist ideologies to a point where feminism could have an appreciable, lasting or functional effect on the lives of ordinary women as a class. Regardless of how correct a feminist analysis we may have reached, or any particular situation, the situation itself seems to change very little. This video is a deeply personal expression and draws conclusions about feminism, love, and sex from personal experience. Social alienation and the end of a love relationship led me to use the theme of psychology as a structuring device for presenting content of personal failure and loss. I was again reminded of Alice Miller's book The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, which inspired an earlier piece, The Drama of the Gifted Child (1992). My Failure to Assimilate functions as a way for me to look at the relationship of personal psychology to art making and, towards the end of the piece, just as the thesis seems to begin spiraling downward into pessimism, to bring the content back out of the void. Content becomes new and refreshed as I find perspectives that may exist even beyond failure. The process of making this particular piece completed ten years of working within themes of lesbian identity, self-realization, and psychologies of love. On finishing this project my work begins to focus outward. My Failure to Assimilatewas named Best Documentary at the Turin Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, 1996. |
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