Bim Bam
1999

Dara Friedman’s Bim Bam demonstrates a sophisticated approach to the form and structure of filmmaking combined with a wry approach to narrative. The artist films herself repeatedly walking through a door and slamming it, turning the camera on its side so that the action, when projected, appears as horizontal. Instead of moving in and out, the door moves upwards and downwards, dislocating the space in the film from that of the gallery in which it is projected. The final image is composed of two film loops projected one above the other, with the sound of slamming deliberately played out of sync, creating a further disorientation of the viewer’s reading of the image. Friedman has commented that the slamming of the door emerged out of her sense of anger and frustration at not being noticed, as a young, female artist. Her dismantling of the conventions of filmic and spatial narrative also reflects the influence of her teacher, Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka, one of the leading figures in the Structuralist film movement of the 1960s.