BURNING OBSESSION

Essay  Canada  1995  English  0:09:00                 

North America's obsession with thinness, dieting and weight loss has deeply affected a generation of women who spend countless hours punishing themselves physically and emotionally for failing to reach the impossibly thin standard that the media confronts them with daily. This videotape by Jane Kubke takes the audience into the ascetic daily ritual of calorie burning which constitutes the anorexic's day and offers a glimpse of some of the fantasies and fears which inspire obsessive calorie burning. Melanie Owen appears as a symbolic representation of a woman with an eating disorder. She exercises excessively and sometimes frantically. Her reality, as seen in stark black and white exercise sequences, is juxtaposed with rich, colour-saturated fantasy sequences which alternately portray her desires and her nightmares. Burning Obsession offers a few minutes of insight into the psychological landscape of the eating disordered mind.   
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