Susan Mogul

Documentary that highlights 18 women and covers a period of time from the 50's to the 90's. The women chosen were selected because they represent the real diversity within both feminism and independent film and video. They range in age from 65 to 25. They are black, white, Puerto Rican, Yugoslavian, Asian American, biracial. They are straight, gay and bisexual. What they share is a need to express their own interpretations of what American culture is and could be and a belief that this work is made particularly powerful through the media.

Filmed in Susan Mogul’s Los Angeles multi-ethnic working class neighborhood, Highland Park, Everyday Echo Street: A Summer Diary, is an insider’s view of how home and neighborhood are constructed in everyday relations. Composed of conversational and anecdotal portraits of neighbors and merchants, Susan ruminates about the past and the present, as she looks out her apartment window. Struggling to arrive at a new definition of “home,” she ponders loss, middle age, and living alone.

Tender and unflinching, four characters’ struggles, wounds and romantic entanglements are gradually revealed in the context of their everyday lives. Filmed in Mogul’s Highland Park neighborhood, a predominantly Latino area of Los Angeles. Produced in association with the Independent Television Service for public television with major funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

"I made Take Off in my studio apartment on Myra Avenue during my second year living in Los Angeles. As a member of the Feminist Studio Workshop, I was writing an essay at the time comparing male artists’ representations of their sexuality with female artists’. Vito Acconci was my model for a male perspective. I had been captivated by his videotapes; particularly Undertone, where he was supposed to be masturbating while seated at a table. The videotape was my ultimate response and commentary on Acconci as well as an expression of my own sexuality." — Susan Mogul

A reverse striptease, non-stop comedic monologue about shopping for clothes, while eating corn nuts. Dressing Up was inspired by the artist’s mother’s penchant for bargain hunting. Mogul produced Dressing Up as a student in the feminist art program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1973.

Lynda Benglis was a visiting artist at CalArts in 1973 when she encouraged then-student Susan Mogul to explore video as a medium. "Big Tip/Back Up/Shout Out" is a direct monologue to the camera about the economic impossibilities of being an artist, especially as a woman. “Her extroversion is so extreme that her story leaps from the vacuum around her, over the camera and off the screen entirely.” —Artforum, from a review after the premiere of this video at Anthology Film Archives in 1976, as part of a program curated by Shigeko Kubota.