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.

A-444

BURNING OBSESSION
Jane Kubke

Essay,
Canada, 1995, 9 min, b & w and colour