Ted Brady

In 1978, Northwestern University film professor Dana Hodgdon created an experimental film based on a phonetic alphabet. He recruited 45 students and faculty members to join him in speaking a single phoneme, which he filmed on 16mm color film. Each phoneme had an example that was an ideological loaded term: revolution, theory, language, Marx, Brecht, and so on. Then, using an optical printer, he excerpted the phonemes and edited them into words and sentences.

65 shots making up a cryptically alluded-to narrative: a lesbian couple's Midwest travels, a hitchhiking young man's journeys, the story of a man who may be having an affair.

North/South employs a dual split-screen format to present an interesting set of travels, one north (right) and one south (left), toward and away from the Loop on Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue, accompanied by seemingly natural sounds of traffic and car radios. - B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Reader