This Is Not Erotica

THIS IS NOT EROTICA, 1995 Jewish Video Competition's First Prize Winner for Experimental Film, intimately reveals a Jewish woman's sexual desire and a fantasy life richly enhanced by resistance poems, old photographs, and tribal kinship.

Rachel Schreiber is a video artist, photographer, writer, and professor. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1995, and in 1995-96 she participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. As of the Fall of 1996, she will be teaching photography, video, and digital imaging at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. Schreiber has been making work on issues of Jewish American identity since 1990. Much of this work, in still photography, video and writing, has dealt with the representation of Jewish women's sexuality in popular culture, and with Rachel's obsessive interest in the history of Jewish women in the Resistance during World War II. More recently, her work has focused on a critique of how representations of the Holocaust effect contemporary conditions of desire. Two of Rachel's tapes, "This is Not Erotica" and "Please Kill Me; I'm a Faggot Nigger Jew," are on this topic. "This is Not Erotica", which was completed in 1994, has screened internationally in festivals, galleries and museums, including the 1995 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. "This is Not Erotica" is distributed by the Video Data Bank in Chicago. "Please Kill Me; I'm a Faggot Nigger Jew" was completed in May of 1996 and will have its world premiere at the 1996 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Currently, Rachel is working on a project that examines Anne Frank's status as the quintessential Holocaust victim, and critiques the ways in which American Jewry has incorporated Anne into its everyday consciousness.