archytele The Vault

S4·E8 Turn Here Sweet Corn

Aired July 9, 1991

Synopsis

A search for meaning beyond cliches and nostalgia, as a family farm is lost to speculative suburban real estate developers. The camera moves through a Minnesota corn field and finds a photograph of a suburban tract clothes-pinned to a cornstalk. Layered with visual and emotional paradoxes, the film juxtaposes innovative video techniques with slices of a simpler, threatened life, in an emotional and personal reflection on the colonization of cornfields by shopping malls.