Ellen Cantor
2021
Madame Bovary's Revenge
Ellen Cantor
"In her very first moving image work, Cantor already displays the masterly use of appropriated footage for which she would become known, inserting explicit scenes from the classic porn film Behind the Green Door (1972) into key scenes of lovemaking from Louis Malle's 1959 succès de scandale The Lovers. Taking as its inspiration the (most likely apocryphal) story that actress Jeanne Moreau and her costar were "really making love" on the set of The Lovers, Cantor shows us what director Malle could not, through the addition of hardcore footage from the iconic Marilyn Chambers porn film. At times the edits between one film and the next are remarkably seamless, creating an ingenious illusion, at others Cantor self-consciously foregrounds her redubbing and re-editing of her VHS source material." - Electronic Arts Intermix
Madame Bovary's Revenge
Bambi's Beastly Buddies
Ellen Cantor
"In Bambi's Beastly Buddies, Bambi and skunk embody innocence, vulnerability and love. I lit Bambi on fire to a refrain from Beethoven's Ode to Joy, on the morning of May 11, 2004, when I read that Nick Berg, an American telecommunications contractor, was beheaded by Islamic militants on live video. I felt Bambi's incineration symbolized the times we live in." — Ellen Cantor
Bambi's Beastly Buddies
Pinochet Porn
Ellen Cantor
Using her 2004 series of eighty-two drawings, Circus Lives from Hell, as an unconventional “script,” feminist artist Ellen Cantor (1961–2013) worked on her most ambitious project, Pinochet Porn, for the last five years of her life. Interweaving fragments of the lives of five people variously affected by Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, the film is both an experimental epic and a “soap opera,” as it explores the tragic and comical relationship between power and sexuality
Pinochet Porn