Teeth
Only on OVID • 26m
Directed by Alice Arnold • Documentary • 2007 • 26 minutes
The vital importance of an attractive smile, accented by gleaming white teeth, is repeatedly emphasized in all forms of contemporary consumer culture. This film is an amusing but informative look at the psychological, social and economic issues involved in our concerns about dental hygiene, and how the marketplace perpetuates and exploits these anxieties.
Featuring interviews with people having admittedly less-than-perfect smiles-with yellow, crooked, missing teeth or gaps-plus commentary by dentists, a psychoanalyst and a health educator, TEETH examines historical and cultural attitudes to teeth, society's current notions of beauty, and the recent boom in teeth-whitening products and cosmetic dentistry.
While discussing how economic inequalities, including the lack of universal dental healthcare insurance, affect Americans' oral health, TEETH also examines hip-hop culture's fashion of sporting gold or diamond-plated "grills" in the mouth as just the latest example of the connections between consumer culture, commercial images, self-identity and personal expression.
Up Next in Only on OVID
-
Ruth Stone's Vast Library of the Fema...
Directed by Nora Jacobson • Documentary • 2022 • 77 minutes
After tragedy strikes, acclaimed poet Ruth Stone retreated to the margins of the literary world, working tirelessly to provide for her children, and transforming her intense grief into poetry, using simple, startling language.
Using a ...
-
Who Made You?
Directed by Iiris Härmä • Documentary • 2019 • 80 minutes
Artificial intelligence is reaching our mental and physical existence like never before in the history of human kind. The film leads us to the world of cyborgs, sex robots and androids. It challenges us to face our values, ethics and reth...
-
Metal and Melancholy
Directed by Heddy Honigmann • Documentary • 1993 • 80 minutes
This documentary is an offbeat "road movie" in which acclaimed documentarian Heddy Honigmann travels with, and thereby discovers the stories of, taxi drivers in Lima. In the early 1990s, in response to Peru's inflationary economy and ...
