The Alarming, Charming Video Art of Cecelia Condit: A Monograph on Fairy Tales

Patricia Mellencamp, Distinguished Professor Emerita, is a well-known scholar of U.S. video art, and the author of Avant-Garde Film, Video, & Feminism, including an early feminist analysis of two short and famous videotapes by Cecelia Condit. In this new monograph, Mellencamp expands her focus, seeing Condit's expanded work through two prisms -- Mellencamp's research on fairy tales, meshed with her childhood memories of fairy tales, and her 20-year experiences as a colleague of Condit at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. This unique scholarly study is also personal history, of two friends -- one guided by intellect, the other by intuition -- linked by work, by profession, and the love and history of U.S. video art. Mellencamp was there from the beginning, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Condit a decade later. As a feminist film theorist, Mellencamp also invokes her substantial knowledge of Freudian theory in this essay which mixes life with art.