Eleanor Antin introduces The Nurse and the Hijackers at EAI on Tuesday, May 19, 2009.

Antin employs the structure of a popular movie genre as an armature for her continuing theater of ideas in this feature-length, narrative videotape. Using hand-painted dolls, who display more than a coincidental resemblance to figures in the art world, Antin recounts the hijacking of "Nurse Eleanor's" plane on the way to St. Tropez. Hijacking is seen as one of the ways by which the powerless can appear to reach the power center quickly and cheaply via the communications media, whose members have been quick to recognize and maximize their importance in this new political genre, some of the references to the real world inherent in its representations. Her means are those available to little girls everywhere — paper dolls and narrative invention.

Producer/Director/Writer/Performer: Eleanor Antin. Technical Director: Charles Cox. Camera: Paul Savage, Steve Cohen, Jim Pierce. Video Engineering: Ron Patten.