Sadie Benning was born in 1973. From age fifteen she was producing videos with a Fisher-Price camera. The films that she produced, practically without leaving her teenage room, take the form of a personal diary, combining images, written texts and texts read aloud. Her first film, A New Year (1989), is a four-minute document on the feelings of a teenager discovering her homosexuality. She happens to be the daughter of James Benning, a producer of experimental films.

Flat is Beautiful is an autobiographical portrait that portrays the solitary world of a young twelve-year-old girl called Taylor, a latchkey [1] child in a poor suburb in Milwaukee (Wisconsin, USA) in the mid-eighties, who uses television and video games as lifelines. Left to her own devices by a loving, but overworked mother and frustrated by a strained relationship with a selfish father, she feels profoundly lonely and, like all prepubescent teenagers, questions her sexual identity. A feeling of unease ensues, exacerbated by her entourage who don't approve of her androgynous appearance and tomboyish ways. Sadie Benning uses various formal approaches to portray the psychological terrain of her heroine: first, she films subjective images with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera (her trademark), and for more “objective” shots (for example exterior scenes) adds images taken with a black and white Super 8 camera. In her most audacious formal approach, Sadie Benning also makes her actors wear paper masks with faces drawn on them, paradoxically placing two realities within the same space: one naturalistic and the other strongly stylised.

[1] Latchkey is a term used to describe children left at home alone by parents who are often absent.

Translated by Jo Garden