Dana Hodgdon

In 1978, Northwestern University film professor Dana Hodgdon created an experimental film based on a phonetic alphabet. He recruited 45 students and faculty members to join him in speaking a single phoneme, which he filmed on 16mm color film. Each phoneme had an example that was an ideological loaded term: revolution, theory, language, Marx, Brecht, and so on. Then, using an optical printer, he excerpted the phonemes and edited them into words and sentences.

An acting and directing exercise gone wrong.

A blend of home movie and structuralist film

"A virtuoso display of all the Hodgdon concerns: language, film politics, and the demystification of the film illusion through jest." - Picture Start catalog entry

Shot in one continuous take and exclusively featuring Dana Hodgon's face and voice as he delivers an ironically edited monologue.