
trailer for The Lollipop Girls Struggle on the Hard Earth
16mm film by Denise Prince
additional work from Object Lessons in
portfolio one
Full
of longing for a return to the safety, the ease, the pretends of childhood, The Lollipop Girls Struggle on the Hard
Earth reminds us that Fantasy organizes our experience of everyday reality
and tells us who we are.
Employing
the visual language of ready-to-wear (fashion) film, a woman finds herself, by
choice, in a perfected world, reminiscent of classic childhood literature. She
is an adult, however, and so her Desire (the memory of the missing thing) includes
fantasies of potency she cannot leave behind.
The
transition from childhood into being an adult is a bridge into a permanent
state of temptation from taking responsibility for one’s pretends. A child’s fantasies
of adult life and an adult’s equally unrealistic fantasies of oneself, as well
as the unrealistic fantasies of what childhood was are the largest stumbling
block. Prince equates personal longing and the Fantasy of satisfaction with
effective advertising. She warns us that cultures messages about what to aspire
to and the way it manipulates Desire to serve commercial ends, are much more
dangerous than the storybooks of childhood. Fantasies of the imaginary body are
difficult to put away on the shelf as what they hold behind the veil is the
awareness of mortality.
Prince creates a bold and evocative space in
which we can imagine and reconstruct the naive, youthful wishes we used to
identify ourselves and to read our world. As children desperate to know about
the hidden world ahead, we accept both the conflict and the confidence offered
to us if only we become an object assigned a value within another's desire:
then the lesson can begin.
This project is supported in part by
the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development
Department
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