Cosmetic Emergency

A second film I saw at the Spectral Evidence film series was Cosmetic Emergency, by Martha Colburn.  In my opinion, this film was by far the most cohesive piece shown in the series.  Colburn explores the issue of beauty and plastic surgery through this stop motion piece, which builds and then resolves before coming to a close.  The film critiques the use of plastic surgery focusing first on women in the media, then on the cosmetic surgeries of soldiers and their families, and finally on the portrayal of beauty in old paintings.

The film begins with a critique of women in the media, and the prominence of cosmetic surgery to achieve stereotypical expectations of beauty.  I very much enjoyed the style of Colburn's painting and how the paints intermittently covered and revealed the women's forms below.  This section of the film was the least interesting to me because I feel that this issue is addressed so frequently, but I still enjoyed seeing Colburn's portrayal of the issue.

The film then went on to critique the rise of cosmetic surgeries in the families of American soldiers.  Colburn claims that such surgeries are compensated by the US government and began to use her stop motion painting to transform images of war into fields of nude women.  While I had never heard of such medical compensation before, this practice struck me as bizarre.  It is one thing to obtain correctional cosmetic surgery to eliminate scars and burns caused in war; it is quite another to provide liposuction and nose jobs for service members.

In the final segment of her film, Colburn moved away from the media and service members and focused instead on the portrayal of beauty in classical paintings.  This critique of famous works of art struck me as much more original than Colburn's previous clips.  I wish that Colburn and elaborated even more on the idea of paintings, as this part of the film was the shortest, and to me the most interesting.