Leslie Thornton’s film Jennifer, Where Are You? revolves around a young girl haphazardly applying red lipstick while a man off-screen calls out, “Jennifer, where are you?” The film cuts between the girl, upside-down scenes of suburban life, and footage of swimming fish, all accompanied by a musical score that grows increasingly ominous. As the imagery, music, and child’s facial expressions change, our perception of the question—one that never gets answered—also shifts, displaying media’s powerful ability to alter meaning with colliding sounds and images.
Thornton emerged from a generation of artists and filmmakers concerned with the ways that film, as a medium, structures identities and perceptions of women. Influenced by the theory that the unconscious mind operates through signs and symbols, like language, Thornton has made the relationship between speech and cinema central to her work. “The way language works has been a lifelong preoccupation,” Thornton says. “Speech was like an object, an enemy, a barrier.”
