Falling down and getting back up is a recurring motif in the early single-channel videos of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. This theme also dominates her film I'm not the girl who misses much, the satirical work about the superficial eroticism in music video clips that Rist gained international renown. The video is based on the line “She’s not the girl who misses much” from the Beatles song Happiness is a warm gun. Rist, who—at the time—was a member of the female band Les Reines Prochaines, sings the slightly modified lyric in constant repetition while dancing to it in an absurdly low-cut black dress that exposes her breasts as if possessed. As the beat accelerates ever faster, Rist’s voice becomes distorted and Mickey Mouse-like, until she slides down the wall in exhaustion and sinks to the floor before picking herself up again and dancing on.
Rist humorously deconstructs the traditional role models of women in the music business and explores new forms of self-dramatization. To this end, she experiments with sound and her appearance in front of the camera, as well as with technical image manipulations, including blurring, false colors, stripes and zigzag cuts that recall the image distortions of old television sets. Even in this early video, Rist succeeds in combining social criticism with the pleasure of looking and the joy of staging the female body.
