The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 39. Beth B.'s Thanatopsis (1991)

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Thanatopsis. 11:04 min., color, 1991. By Beth B. Ubuweb's description:

Beth B, in collaboration with legendary downtown performance artist/musician Lydia Lunch, creates a chilling yet poetic vision of despairing nihilism — literally, a "meditation on death." In this noirishly rendered narrative, a woman negotiates the banalities of life. In her hypnotic voiceover monologue, the narrator (Lunch) repeats "Annie get your gun," a warning of impending doom.

I come to this video knowing little about its creators: nothing about Beth B. and next to nothing about Lydia Lunch. What I do know about Lydia Lunch, how she called Brian Eno's albums "an expression of mediocrity," doesn't really endear her to me. Here, she's both narrator and sole character, flatly intoning a despairing monologue in voiceover as she comes home to her apartment, gets the mail, wanders the kitchen, and then collapses into a fetal-ish position in bed.

There's some media and aesthetic mixture going on here: the titles introduce the project as a "film/tape," and its different visual layers use different color schemes. The starkest contrast comes with Lunch's occasionally glimpsed monologue-speaking head, whose red hair and lips pop against the aforementioned "noirishly rendered" apartment scenes. Indeed, it's almost a credible noir look, given the impoverished texture of 1991's video technology. Lunch's spiky dress sense cuts interestingly through the flat midcentury-ness of the kitchen. Combine that with the jitters, trails of light, and non-lip-sync that might just be video rendering or compression issues, and there are visual interactions worth seeing here.

I wish I could find something to say about the monologue, but it reminds me too much of the stock artist's anguish 'n anomie you hear in modern-day projects dealing with Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. This isn't Thanatopsis' fault, necessarily, though the framing doesn't exactly motivate me to pick out which of the sentences seem most intelligent. I mostly just inadvertently took stock of the clichés: "One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic," the thoroughgoing youth of soldiers, etc.

It's worth noting that Beth B.'s production company is called "B Movies". That's clever enough that I look forward to her her other two productions in Ubuweb's archives.

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That's clever enough that I look forward to her her other two productions in Ubuweb's archives.

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