Synopsis

Made by Terry Flaxton, Tony Cooper, Penny Dedman as part of the Video Art group Vida, Documentary Rape is set in San Francisco and is a satirical, scathing video which critiques the making of travelogues and ‘Portrait of a Place’ documentaries. The film begins with an American man on the telephone in his office, talking about a British film crew who are coming to town to film a ‘social misery’ film. He says he is looking for a ‘Black, Jewish, Lesbian Anarchist’ to present. The film transposes the voiceover techniques used by John Smith in his seminal work The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) to the streets of San Francisco, as a presenter describes the ‘ravenous’ appetite of documentary cameras. Documentary Rape was made half-way through Vida’s shooting of Towards Intuition, an art documentary.