Works by Laura Kipnis, Dale Hoyt and Patti Podesta Patti Podesta in Person The unauthorized biography is a great genre: it allows you to approach a subject without the usual constraints of good taste, deference and Party line. Using an unimpeachable source of information, Patti Podesta's A Short Conversation from the Grave with Joan Burroughs (1991, 17 mins) is just that, conversing with William Burroughs' wife, now housed in Heaven. Podesta's richly designed work gets behind the truth of Joan's death-a "William Tell" accident with William at the trigger-by creating a privileged but plausible point of view, that of the deceased victim. The lush re-staging of this scene from the Beat era testifies to it being more than just a Beat error. Dale Hoyt's The Complete Anne Frank (1985, 36 mins) has the effect of a coffee ring on a "Hello Kitty" diary: tainted innocence. Anne Frank, myth and media icon, is played by four actresses as she grapples with awakening sexuality. This wry and strangely vertiginous teleplay uses Frank's claustrophobic hiding to somehow cleave adolescent trauma to historical upheaval. Trauma also enters history in Laura Kipnis' audacious Marx the Video: A Politics of Revolting Bodies (1990, 27 mins). Drawing on Marx's letters to Engels, which stressed his bodily discomfort from carbuncle attacks, Kipnis locates Marx's subjectivity within his theoretical text. Here, the body becomes a site of displacement with its own political economy and thwarted revolution. Appropriating the MTV aesthetic of waning capitalism, Kipnis gets high marks for revisionism. --Steve Seid