Red Film

Sara Cwynar’s Red Film, 2018, continues the artist’s meditations on the intersection of identity and capitalism. Cwynar quotes writers and philosophers as she pulls focus on the color-coding of mass production: of cosmetics, shoes, and the red muscle car. Red Film critiques capital’s persuasive, constant stream of pressures on women to conform and consume; it questions the effects of this torrent on the self; and it points to the use of “high art” to sell aspirational merchandise, as distilled in a “Cézanne” branded jewelry box.

The film’s rich layering of vertiginous content – including multiple voices reading a range of quotations; the artist, upside down, self-reflexively addressing the camera; and a group of women in red performing choreographed gestures – produces an almost Brechtian estrangement, where, in this instance, the sense of a concrete, autonomous self is fragmented and destabilized. Cwynar has written:

“Trying to speak, but everything you say is something someone told you, or everything you have is something someone already made for you. Being born into a world where so many things are prescribed already: how you should look, what you should say, how something as intangible as the color red is going to be reproduced. All the codes and orders are not your own but you know them so intimately you are of them as a woman under capitalism. Operating in cycles that feel already decided for you in advance, buying and selling, improving, speaking, not speaking.”