Bay Area Premiere!
Artist in Person

During the rank rise of the Reagan era, the ever-transgressive Kathy Acker penned one of her most notorious novels, Blood and Guts in High School. The story followed the hardcore rearing of punked-out Janie as she waged war with the forces of social indoctrination. Now Laura Parnes, a New York–based artist, has adapted much of this subversive saga in a spare style she calls “Brechtian MTV.” In Blood and Guts in High School (2006, 30 mins), Janie (played by Stephanie Vella) rails against institutionalized idiocy in a vivid setting punctured by the Jonestown Massacre, the Iranian hostage crisis, the Moral Majority, and other historical hoodoo. Parnes's earlier Hollywood Inferno: Episode One (2001, 38 mins) chucks urbanity for the candy-colored suburbs of SoCal. Her Dante, Sandy, is taken under the tutelage of a modern-day Virgil, a screenwriter who does deep readings of Star Wars. Sandy's career path leads her through a tormented landscape of perky Catholic models, lecherous Furbies, and Insane Clown Posse wannabes. The principal sin in this ring of Hell is voyeurism, experienced through the ever-present peephole.