My Failure to Assimilate
An essay and a documentary examining the failure of society to accept feminist ideologies to a point where feminism could have an appreciable, lasting or functional effect on the lives of ordinary women as a class. This video represents a deeply personal expression of liberation as well as frustration, and draws conclusions about feminism, love, and sex from personal experience.
Cecilia Dougherty
Director
Also Directed by Cecilia Dougherty
A portrait of poet Eileen Myles as she reads from her novel "Cool For You" and goes about the day in her East Village home.
Shot primarily in Fisher-Price pixelvision, for the “murky look of memory," COAL MINER'S GRANDDAUGHTER is a profoundly moving family portrait focusing on the youngest daughter Jane, as she leaves her Pennsylvania home and finds sexual independence in San Francisco.
Taking queer artistic license, Dougherty and Singer together portray a gay male playwright who took 1960s London by storm. The result is a witty play on narcissism and split personality that captures the banality of stardom while paying tribute to promiscuity and transgression.
An afternoon with San Francisco writers Kevin Killian and Cedar Sigo, as Kevin reads one of Cedar's poems and then one of his own.
A 1987 video by Cecilia Dougherty
With an all-female cast, featuring Suzie Bright as John Lennon, Cecilia Dougherty's Grapefruit plays with the romanticized history of the iconic Fab Four, gently mocking John and Yoko’s banal squabbles and obsessive rituals of self-display. Based obliquely on Yoko Ono’s book, the piece works on many levels to reposition this mythic tale of the Beatles by casting '80s women in mod drag—effectively mapping the lesbian sub-culture onto heterosexual mass culture. Discounting the importance of reproducing facts and historical accuracy, Dougherty gives an incisive reading of the creation of pop culture icons: it doesn’t matter who plays John Lennon because ultimately John Lennon is not a person anymore. As a star, he is a projection of our society’s collective needs and desires.
This video is about the idea of narcissistic transference, sexual dependency, and the failure to distinguish between the self and the loved one. It is also about using love to create a border between oneself and political and psychological oppression.
