What you see is what you get

A remnant of a performance based on Robert Aldrich’s pioneering queer film The killing of sister George (1968), Stefanie Seibold’s video intercuts an all-woman club scene from the film with black frames. The result is a meditation on sameness and difference (on the explosive differences in assumed sameness) and on the passions filmic identification can unleash when an image surrenders to its afterimage. A triple historical document, then, of a performance based on a film (itself adapted from a stage play), Seibold’s video leaves ‘you’ (us) with glimpses of cinema’s capacity to portray the invisible: here, the social divisions that at the same time alienate women and allow them, and us, to identify with each other in a crowd.

(By Antony Hudek)