Dangling by Their Mouths
Colin Campbell
Dangling by their Mouths, one of Canadian video artist Colin Campbell’s DIY masterpieces, is a complex, humorous yet bleak study of the subjects of relationships, death and grief. The film documents the exchange between European art critic Anna, played by Campbell himself, and three other persons: her lesbian partner, who dies of cancer during the film, a Canadian actor and theatre director, and a young performance artist, whose roles include that of Anna.
The two men court the art critic, the camera repeatedly straying from the actual plot and zooming in on the sexually charged movements of the characters.
The death of her lover Anouk severely traumatises the idolized critic. The charismatic, forthright character becomes an increasingly broody, sinister shadow of herself. She recites a lengthy monologue from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Like the matriarch Addie Bundren in Faulkner’s novel, Anouk also speaks to Anna at the end about the dead.
Colin Campbell
The video artist, author and gender theorist was born in Reston, Manitoba in 1942. He studied at the University of Manitoba and at Claremont Graduate School in California, and in the late 1960s started producing his first video work. In the early 1980s, he was a guest professor at highly influential The Woman from Malibu’s Video Art Academy. He later taught at the cultural sciences department of the University of Toronto, where he founded the Visual Studies programme. In thirty prolific years, Campbell produced more than fifty works, often incorporating his own restrained transgender performances. Campbell curated diverse video and performance programmes in Toronto, Montreal and Rio de Janeiro and was co-founder of the independent video distributor Vtape. He represented Canada with his work at the Venice Biennial in 1980, at the Istanbul Biennial and 1977 at documenta 6.
Films by Colin Campbell (Selection)
Que Sera Sera 2001 | Disheveled Destiny 2000 | Déjà vu 1999 | Skin 1992 | No Voice Over 1986 | The Woman from Malibu 1976 | With Modern Love 1979 | Bad Girls True/False 1972
