Blood and Guts in High School (2004) Laura Parnes

Video Installation, 2004-2009, 50 min. Shown as an installation at Participant Inc., NYC, Locust Projects, Miami and Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam. Screened at The Pacific Film Archives at the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley. “Blood and Guts in High School“ features actress Stephanie Vella in a series of video installations that re-imagine punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker’s book of the same title. The book received notoriety from 1978-1982 during the rise of Reagan republicanism and the emergence of punk rock. In Parnes’ interpretation, each video-chapter presents a typical scene in the life of Janie bracketed by US news events from the time period in which the book was written. These events saturate the character’s daily experience, informing her adolescent, nihilistic worldview and her desire for rebellion. As the viewer looks back at pivotal historical events (Jonestown Massacre, Moral Majority, Three Mile Island etc.) connections are drawn in relation to our current political situation. Chosen by Ed Halter in the Village Voice for his top 8 film and videos of 2006. Shot with an hallucination Kubrickian eye, BLOOD AND GUTS brings a sleek cinematic aesthetic to the often ineptly-lensed genre of gallery video, and offers the form a new role: as Hollywood’s unconscious, peeping into the nightmare from which we cannot awake. Ed Halter, Village Voice critic writing for Cinematexas Filmed on bare-bones sets put together in gallery spaces, the video is a model of how to bring off an ambitions project with scant resources, and also of how to respect source material while transforming it. And where Acker’s novels have a quick-hit crash-and-burn intensity, Ms. Parnes’s video floats like a shark, forever hovering, but always watching and Cotter, New York Times