BETTER LIGHTINGby Kathryn RameyScreening at THE BRATTLE, Sept. 17, 2026
Enraged by the overturning of Roe v. Wade and all the other nonsense that the current regime has created this aggressive little agitprop appropriates TV commercials about how streetlights should make women feel safe and uses them as a critique of the white women who voted for this tyranny.
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What was the starting point for BETTER LIGHTING, and how did the idea develop?
A big part of my creative practice has been the re-use and re-interpretation of media detritus. What I mean by this is found footage that has been cast off / displaced from its original / intended purpose. Deeply inspired by the Lettrists and Situationalists of the mid to late 20th century (such as Isadore Isou and Guy Debord) as well as more contemporary artists such as Craig Baldwin and Barbara Kruger I take the cast offs of educational and advertising media and redeploy it to undermine the civil society and state norms it was produced to uphold. BETTER LIGHTING uses two 30-second GE advertisements from the mi-20th century that feature two different white women who are acting "afraid" as they walk down the street at night only to arrive at the corner under a streetlight and breathe a sigh of relief. The advertisement makes use of a very common strategy used on women to control their movements and get them to buy into things like the surveillance state and militant police departments -- that of fear of the unknown, stranger, dark etc..
A big part of my creative practice has been the re-use and re-interpretation of media detritus. What I mean by this is found footage that has been cast off / displaced from its original / intended purpose. Deeply inspired by the Lettrists and Situationalists of the mid to late 20th century (such as Isadore Isou and Guy Debord) as well as more contemporary artists such as Craig Baldwin and Barbara Kruger I take the cast offs of educational and advertising media and redeploy it to undermine the civil society and state norms it was produced to uphold. BETTER LIGHTING uses two 30-second GE advertisements from the mi-20th century that feature two different white women who are acting "afraid" as they walk down the street at night only to arrive at the corner under a streetlight and breathe a sigh of relief. The advertisement makes use of a very common strategy used on women to control their movements and get them to buy into things like the surveillance state and militant police departments -- that of fear of the unknown, stranger, dark etc..
These strategies were used historically to justify horrific atrocities against non-white people, especially men and they were also used as a way to control women and their bodies. Never mind the fact that women are far more likely to suffer at the hands of someone they know, a current or former sexual partner, parent or sibling rather than a stranger of any color. These strategies are at the very heart of white supremacist ideology which is inherently patriarchal and misogynist as well as racist, ageist, homophobic and ableist. I held onto these pieces of film for over 20 years waiting for the right time for their reinvention. After Roe v. Wade was overturned it seemed that the time had come to use them to create an agitation. Trump would never have won either of his elections that gained for him the ability to stack the supreme court with anti-choice justices IF WHITE WOMEN HAD NOT VOTED FOR HIM --- TWICE. White women chose to side with white supremacy over any other consideration. That he is a rapist. That he is a crook. That he is supremely unfit for office. And so, as a white woman I chose to make a piece of propaganda re-inventing these advertisements that rely on white women's fear to show who the true enemy of all women is - white women voters. We need to hold each other accountable and we need to speak the truth.
How did you approach the speed and rhythm of the film, particularly as the sequence is repeated, rewound, and increasingly sped up? What does that changing pace add to the film's political message?
Repetition is a strategy to make people reexamine their perceptions. Film goes backwards and forward at "speed" and faster or slower. It can be inverted, desaturated, manipulated. It is fundamentally a made thing saturated with the intentions of the maker BUT ALSO open to the strategies of interpretation of the viewer. In the first pass I show the pieces as close as possible to their intended speed and coloration (the original films are deeply faded as color films tend to be) but with overlays of text mirrored up and down that invert half of each frame with the words "WOMEN HAVE BEEN TRAINED TO FEAR THE DARK" - of course dark here is intended to mean both absence of light but also non-white people and the message is that this FEAR is LEARNED. Behind that lesson is both the control of women's bodies and the way in which they are used as weapon against BIPOC people. Meanwhile the male VOG narrator says "Better lighting makes you feel better!" Then the footage desaturates and rewinds quickly and restarts in black and white with the text over it - "WE SHOULD FEAR WHITE WOMEN VOTERS". The words women and voters are over the opening shots of the women walking down the street. Because there is no color and because you can actually see them now, you are drawn to actually LOOK at THEM. It's clear they are acting afraid because of course they are actors and so their relief at "better lighting" is a performance. Then a flashing wire hanger appears - the ubiquitous "sign" of back alley abortions and the film rewinds again and speeds backwards in color and forwards in black and white and then cuts to the middle of the scene in color all the while with the words superimposed "WHITE WOMEN ARE A CURSE AGAINST THEIR SEX" repeating three times.
Repetition is a strategy to make people reexamine their perceptions. Film goes backwards and forward at "speed" and faster or slower. It can be inverted, desaturated, manipulated. It is fundamentally a made thing saturated with the intentions of the maker BUT ALSO open to the strategies of interpretation of the viewer. In the first pass I show the pieces as close as possible to their intended speed and coloration (the original films are deeply faded as color films tend to be) but with overlays of text mirrored up and down that invert half of each frame with the words "WOMEN HAVE BEEN TRAINED TO FEAR THE DARK" - of course dark here is intended to mean both absence of light but also non-white people and the message is that this FEAR is LEARNED. Behind that lesson is both the control of women's bodies and the way in which they are used as weapon against BIPOC people. Meanwhile the male VOG narrator says "Better lighting makes you feel better!" Then the footage desaturates and rewinds quickly and restarts in black and white with the text over it - "WE SHOULD FEAR WHITE WOMEN VOTERS". The words women and voters are over the opening shots of the women walking down the street. Because there is no color and because you can actually see them now, you are drawn to actually LOOK at THEM. It's clear they are acting afraid because of course they are actors and so their relief at "better lighting" is a performance. Then a flashing wire hanger appears - the ubiquitous "sign" of back alley abortions and the film rewinds again and speeds backwards in color and forwards in black and white and then cuts to the middle of the scene in color all the while with the words superimposed "WHITE WOMEN ARE A CURSE AGAINST THEIR SEX" repeating three times.
This is the MESSAGE and these techniques and manipulations have all been with the intention of getting you to look past the performance to the facts. ALL WOMEN lost bodily autonomy in the UNITED STATES because SOME WHITE WOMEN prefer white supremacy for themselves over equality for everyone.
What led you to present the found footage in a split-screen format, and the intention behind dividing the image lengthwise and using inverted colors? How did these visual transformations affect the way you wanted us to read the footage?
This piece was really inspired by Barbara Kruger's Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground), (1989). Everything from the text to the font to the inversions. As a person who has worked in 16mm most of their career I developed an interest in wide screen that was first featured in my dual projector installation ENOLAEMEVAEL/LEAVEMEALONE (2015). I originally planned on doing this in 16mm film and having it as a dual projection but the problem I kept having was syncing the projectors perfectly. I also wanted to get this piece out more quickly and more broadly than a 16mm projection would have allowed so once I entered the digital format anything was possible. As for how the ways I change the footage impacts the message, beyond what I said above about repetition and desaturation pointing to the constructedness of the original performances as well as emphasizing the main message of the work I also wanted to use the vernacular and pacing of really contemporary media where time, space and motion are manipulated digitally revealing the artificiality of the image on one hand but its materiality or frame by frame ness on the other. In the end the medium and the message are both very malleable in the digital format.
This piece was really inspired by Barbara Kruger's Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground), (1989). Everything from the text to the font to the inversions. As a person who has worked in 16mm most of their career I developed an interest in wide screen that was first featured in my dual projector installation ENOLAEMEVAEL/LEAVEMEALONE (2015). I originally planned on doing this in 16mm film and having it as a dual projection but the problem I kept having was syncing the projectors perfectly. I also wanted to get this piece out more quickly and more broadly than a 16mm projection would have allowed so once I entered the digital format anything was possible. As for how the ways I change the footage impacts the message, beyond what I said above about repetition and desaturation pointing to the constructedness of the original performances as well as emphasizing the main message of the work I also wanted to use the vernacular and pacing of really contemporary media where time, space and motion are manipulated digitally revealing the artificiality of the image on one hand but its materiality or frame by frame ness on the other. In the end the medium and the message are both very malleable in the digital format.
The film ends with a cat meowing. Why did you choose to end the film with this sound?
I also let the film be pink in the beginning. The color pink and the "pussy" hat are two of contemporary feminist (and queer in the color pink!) political movements. The cat meowing is a nod to this. We do need BETTER LIGHTING but not in the way the commercial implies. Better lighting would mean pulling back the curtains of power to reveal the true anti-women (and anti human) agenda of the contemporary right in politics. Cats are small but almost everyone is afraid of a hissing cat
I also let the film be pink in the beginning. The color pink and the "pussy" hat are two of contemporary feminist (and queer in the color pink!) political movements. The cat meowing is a nod to this. We do need BETTER LIGHTING but not in the way the commercial implies. Better lighting would mean pulling back the curtains of power to reveal the true anti-women (and anti human) agenda of the contemporary right in politics. Cats are small but almost everyone is afraid of a hissing cat
Could you tell us a little about your other work and what you are currently working on?
My current long form project is SILVER & earth an experimental non-fiction film about silver extraction, climate change and the relationship between human creativity and environmental devastation. I am also working on a short film in situ using phytograms and cyanotype in a poetic mediation on a recent medical diagnosis.
My current long form project is SILVER & earth an experimental non-fiction film about silver extraction, climate change and the relationship between human creativity and environmental devastation. I am also working on a short film in situ using phytograms and cyanotype in a poetic mediation on a recent medical diagnosis.
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Kathryn Ramey (1967), Vancouver, WA / USA. A Guggenheim and Creative Capital fellow with an MFA in film and a PhD in anthropology who has made over a dozen films and installations, contributed numerous articles to anthologies and journals and written the essential text “Experimental Filmmaking: BREAK THE MACHINE” (Routledge, 2015). Her films operate at the intersection of experimental analogue processes and ethnographic research and are characterized by hand-processing, optical printing, and animation. She has screened at several festivals such as Toronto, Ann Arbor, TriBeca, Ji.hlava, and 25fps, among others. She is a full professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College, Boston, MA USA.
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