Research Catalog

Title

Stories from the old ruin/Leaving the old ruin [videorecording] / produced by Irit Batsry.

Publication

New York : Irit Batsry, 1989.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Batsry, Irit.

Description

1 videocassette (49 min.) : sd., col.; 1/2 in.

Summary

In Stories from the old ruin, "a faked report of an imaginary investigation," Batsry combines electronically altered and colorized stills with moving images and text of Pliny the Younger's eyewitness account of the destruction of Pompeii, to reflect on the dissolution of civilizations, both ancient and modern. Images of an Asian woman holding her hands up defensively evoke emblematic media representations of Hiroshima and Vietnam, countering the natural cataclysm of Vesuvius with those human-engineered disasters. Batsry fragments and coalesces the image, dismantling the monolith of the past to form both a personal and collective memory. Leaving the old ruin "is a sea journey from past to future, from dark to light ... It examines the state of a social/personal consciousness in transit between a collapsed past and a utopic future." In this segment, the videomaker fashions a psychological landscape of a post-holocaust society which "turned our best friends into a handful of dust" and made the survivors refugees trying "to make sense of what we left us." Commonality of experience is concretized in the image of the running man "heavy with memory."

Subject

• Video art

Credits (note)

• Producer, director, editor, special effects, Irit Batsry.

Title

Stories from the old ruin/Leaving the old ruin [videorecording] / produced by Irit Batsry.

Imprint

New York : Irit Batsry, 1989.

Credits

Producer, director, editor, special effects, Irit Batsry.

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Added Author

Batsry, Irit.

Branch Call Number

VTH 2219 S