More Than Meets the Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda

Overview

More Than Meets The Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda is a remake of one of Jane Fonda's exercise videos, with Scott Stark as the performer, set in a variety of locations, both public and private. The filmmaker underscores a sense of the supposed embarrassment a male might feel by inhabiting what is essentially a feminine landscape. By overlaying the diligent exercise imagery with provocative and pointed quotations from Jane Fonda's activist days, as well as her thoughtful ruminations from her recent autobiography on war, political transformation, female anxiety, and the "need to be perfect," this remake gives voice to the artist's feelings about the criminality of contemporary war-making and our complicity in a world that gives rise to a kind of cultural bulimia. In the process, the video becomes an indirect chronicle of the remaking of a celebrity activist and the cultural shifts that allowed it to happen.