FLICKSKIN    

"FLICKSKIN"
by Craig Baldwin
COLOR, SOUND, SUPER 8MM, 9 mins., 1975 (later water-damaged)

Working in a porn theater in the 70s, thoroughly familiarized with the gestures of the skinflick genre, led Baldwin to more closely de-construct and analyze individual shots for both their abstract beauty and for their inherent ideology of voyeurism and power. Granular close-ups, hypnotic repetition, throbbing flickers, and uncanny gestures are foregrounded through his DIY rear-screen photography, using different projection speeds and color filters. Mixing in contemporaneous kids' toy commercials invites viewers to understand single shots of bodily movements as parts of the speech of a certain "commodity fetishism".