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OUTFITUMENTARY

By K8 HARDY

PICTURE PALACE PICTURES - as SALES All rights, World / PROD

First film - Completed 2016

In 2001, artist and filmmaker K8 Hardy set out to document her daily outfits on video. Over an eleven-year period, until the camera broke, she captured these outfits - and outfitting- on a fairly consistent, if not daily basis.

Festivals
& Awards

Rotterdam IFFR 2016

Bright Futures

Doc Fortnight 2016

Official Selection

Era New Horizons - Poland 2017

Art & Film Competition

Pink Apple, Switzerland 2017

Special Presentation

- Year of production
- 2016
- Genres
- First film, Documentary, True Story
- Countries
- USA
- Languages
- ENGLISH
- Duration
- 82 mn
- Director(s)
- K8 HARDY
- Cast
- K8 HARDY
- Producer(s)
- Madeleine MOLYNEAUX (PICTURE PALACE PICTURES)
- Synopsis
- In 2001, artist and filmmaker K8 Hardy set out to document her daily outfits on video. Over an eleven-year period, until the camera broke, she captured these outfits - and outfitting- on a fairly consistent, if not daily basis. She used the same shitty, mini-DV camera and filmed in ever-changing living spaces and art studios in New York. What emerged is a record of the way a young, lesbian feminist dressed and styled in her “coming of age” and an examination of coded fashion statements.
  
  (from director's statement)
  "In 2001, I set out on the structuralist journey that became my first feature film, Outfitumentary. I named the project at the outset, and considered it a document for posterity, an important record of the dress codes of a radical lesbian undergroundThe formal rules I imposed were simple: to roll my video camera and capture a shot of myself from head to toe with a turn to provide front and back. Ultimately, I played fast and loose with my own rules, but stayed true to my original intentions.
  
  The film serves to express a fundamental principle that runs through my work and practice—the ways in which the body becomes its own medium. First and foremost, the film is a formal and structural exercise. It is less about narcissism—the narcissism that one might assume given that I am on camera for every frame of the film—than it is about identity, and the way in which both the materiality of the body and its subsequent “outfitting” - in private and public life - serves to refine, define and probe the very nature of the body politic.
  
  As I was consistently shooting this project, my artistic practice tangentially grew to include live performance, often linked to a video signal. Perhaps it was coincidence, perhaps not—I stopped shooting Outfitumentary in early 2012, when my camera finally broke. It was at the same period that I was included in the Whitney Biennial.
  
  In the last few years, I returned to the footage I shot, and began crafting the project into a feature length film. I describe Outfitumentary as a gesamtkunstwerk.
  My formative years as an artist were spent making video art and experimental Super-8 films. I was interested in the art of cinema, and also in my own performance. I was interested in video as a democratic medium and in its ability to circulate so easily on tapes. I dove into shooting and hand-processing super-8, splicing my films by hand, and also working with 16mm.
  
  I discovered video art through punk rock and riot Grrrl, and through artists and bands that were making videos in that scene. Video was the easiest way for me to make my own statement, to represent myself as a young angry woman, and to get the work out there. I had previously been making small zines and mailing them all over the states. I had a drive to tell my own story. This was a step beyond.

OUTFITUMENTARY

Festivals& Awards

Festivals
& Awards