Stephanie Beroes

This collection of short films represents a hint of the tectonic shift in the underground film world in connection with the punk rock “movement.” Restored from original negatives, it showcases the reasonably well-known alongside the extremely rare, from music shorts to impressionistic documentary.

With music by The Cardboards, The Snakes, Hans Brinker and The Dykes. By combining semi-fictionalized and documentary material, this film is as definitive a record of the Pittsburgh punk scene during its nascent underground as anyone could hope for. Beroes' band footage is radical departure from the gimmickry of stereotyped rock band documentary in its use of pans and slow dollys, capturing small glimpses of the musicians at work that a 'PR' film would have avoided at all costs. The cinematography demands a reconsideration of the rock band documentary's hoary technical vocabulary. From the time this film was made changes have already taken place in Pittsburgh punk-dom as the bands have moved from an insular salon society to more 'legitimate' venues. Some say things are better than ever, others mourn the passing of Pittsburgh punk's innocence. Beroes in Debt Begins at 20 has produced not only entertainment, but also a small and very precious time capsule.

Valley Fever shares certain concerns with Beroes' earlier film Recital. Again, she is interested in the locus of individual perception, but is less concerned with emotion than with the bounds of human consciousness. Like Recital, the film is also highly structured and revolves around the reading of various texts. It involves two 'characters', a woman and a man, who, according to Beroes, carry on a 'disjunctive conversation about the effects of illness on perception. While the man reads from a scientific treatise on the syndrome of fever, the woman chooses the words of Merleau-Ponty, explaining her experience in phenomenological terms. They show each other film footage in an attempt to visualise/exchange their perceptions. But ultimately the film confirms their inability to 'see eye to eye'.' In her choice of cinema as a medium of 'exchange' within the film, Beroes also points to the dilemma of the artist and the problematics of communicating one's singular vision to the larger world.

Inspired by Simone De Beauvoir's writings Stephanie Beroes' film Recital addresses the state of 'woman in love', a situation fraught less with ecstasy than with risk and pain. Recital is a highly structured film. Each section involves a woman, situated in some external local, reading a letter or other text. It is clear that the women are not the authors of what they read. The first text is a letter expressing the pain of unrequited love, the abyss of frustrated passion, however read in a monotone with no peaks of feeling. This pattern of love letter reading is repeated with several other readers: one breaks up laughing when she comes to a passage: 'Oh, yes, I love you, I love you.' Clearly the subject is not one of true comedy, particularly since the letters recited are ones Beroes once earnestly composed. Beroes' goal, however, is a kind of distanced deconstruction of the experience, in an attempt to view it with the lessons of knowledge and time.

A short erotic fantasy of a sensual love between a woman and a cat.