Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry
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- 1979
| Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry | |
|---|---|
Release date |
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Running time | 7 mins. |
Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry is a 1979 video art piece by Dara Birnbaum. The piece is constructed of footage recorded from the television game show Hollywood Squares. The bulk of the piece is made up from recorded introductory gestures of female celebrities participating in that game show, which are synced to then-contemporary disco songs.
Like Birnbaum's 1978 video Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, the single-channel video Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry was created via Birnbaum's recording of broadcast television, which consists of a great part of her late 1970s practice[1] The content of the video consists of segments of the introductory shots of female celebrities on the television game show Hollywood Squares, in which they greet the audience with exaggerated body movements and facial gestures. These segments are repeated throughout the video,[2] and are often rewound giving a "jerky" appearance to these shots. The face shots are accompanied by panning shots of the tic-tac-toe board of the Hollywood Squares set, showing the entire grid and the celebrities within.
In between Hollywood Squares footage, Birnbaum places black screens with white layers displaying the lyrics to songs used in the video. Two of these songs are by amateur singers, "Yellow Bird" and the English nursery rhyme Georgie Porgie, the latter of which being the origin of the video's title. Birnbaum also uses two contemporary disco songs in this piece, including the band Toto's adaptation of the previous rhyme Georgy Porgy and singer-songwriting duo Ashford & Simpson's Found a Cure.[3] Unlike the other songs, Toto's "Georgy Porgy" is synchronized to the introductory shots, with the music choreographing and animating the movements of the women in the squares.[4]
In creating Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry Birnbaum chose women she considered female stereotypes on Hollywood Squares, whose careers "had mostly faded." Birnbaum chose women from three categories: a blond, a brunette, and a child, unique due to their self presentation in the game show. Likewise Birnbaum notes the "unreal" nature of these gestures along with their intent of appealing to a large television audience.[5] Birnbaum's choice of contemporary disco songs was informed by her perception of the Hollywood Squares grid looking like a Disco floor.[5]