Desire Inc. (1990)

Directed by

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Genre

documentary film

Country

United States

Runtime

27 min

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This video documentary pieces together fictional TV ads, viewer responses, and artist commentary. It explores how television can create personal connections between viewers and the public media space.

intimatethought-provokingexperimentalintrospectiveunusualconceptualinteractiveprovocative

What happens

Desire Inc. (1990) is a video documentary piece created by the artist Lynn Hershman (now known as Lynn Hershman Leeson). Hershman created a series of seductive television ads in which a sexy woman asked for viewers to call her. The ads, interviews with the respondents to the ad, and commentary from Hershman are woven together to create the 26-minute video. This is one of Hershman's significant works, and it demonstrates the viewers' intense personal relationship to the public space. It is a rare piece of video art that makes television interactive, where the response from a viewer is as much the art as the ad itself. Hershman uses the form of the TV commercial, which usually just directs desire toward consumer objects, to direct viewers toward actual interpersonal connection instead. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

• Dominoes: Portrait of a Decade (1990)
• The Forbidden Land (1990)
• Women Who Made the Movies (1990)
• Privilege (1990)
• Sink or Swim (1990)
• Baraka (1992)
• A Spy in the House that Ruth Built (1990)
• Journey into Life: The World of the Unborn (1990)