Vivian Liddell

Director’s Statement Panty Raid:

This is my second short, animated film. I started making clay figures as maquettes to try out lighting and color for my paintings, and then became interested in the expanded narrative potential of bringing the characters in my paintings to life through film.

I’ve spent two decades in “The Classic City” (Athens, Georgia) surrounded by a dual Greek culture. Fraternities and sororities separate students by gender and play a part in cementing gender roles and power structures for the next generation; ubiquitous Classical architecture (often accompanied by manicured landscape) is a constant reminder of Western ideals. After a career of painting the female figure and exploring themes related to the male gaze and the lingering inequalities that women face, I’ve focused the past five years on the male figure and his domain.

I create tiny “plays” with handmade props and plasticine figures to reenact imagined dramas that might happen on any home football game day. These sets become animations and act as anchors for works in various media. My work relies on humor but asks serious questions about how branding, everyday rituals, and consumerism play into established power dynamics. “Panty Raid” is the first of two animations that were inspired by some young men that I saw carrying rocks up a hill here in Athens during rush week’s fraternity recruitment. One of them had been sidelined by his potential brothers and was wearing a traffic cone as a kind of dunce hat. I started “Panty Raid” right after Roe v. Wade was overturned, and I remembered a photo I’d seen a few years before of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s fraternity brothers at Yale with a flag they’d made from women’s lingerie.