VIDEO VISIONS
Saturday 29 October 2005, at 2pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3

SPECIALIZED TECHNICIANS REQUIRED: BEING LUIS PORCAR
Manuel Saiz, Spain, 2004, video, colour, sound, 2 min
Manuel Saiz has done it! The Famous Hollywood Actor has once again gracefully accepted to be or not to be what he is. Witness the film that inspired the pun in the title of this short video – he is not afraid of a few digs at his person and status. He probably has a small army of agents, managers and assistants around him, to keep all those who are trying to make use of him because of his name at a distance. Perhaps Manuel Saiz was lucky, perhaps he knows the friends of the friends of – perhaps he has been waiting on the doorstep and hanging on the phone for months, driving the whole army crazy. He probably just used a sympathetic argument that struck the right cord: Would the actor who likes role reversals for once lend his charismatic voice to a man who is used to doing precisely that? A man who always obligingly keeps out of sight, but who is, to the Spanish speaking part of the world population, the actor’s mouthpiece, and therefore to a great extent ‘is him’. Being Luis Porcar is part of the series Specialized Technicians Required, and it makes you wonder who actually is the specialized technician in this construction. Is it the main character, the man who does the dubbing, or is it the artist himself, who nowadays has to master so many different skills in order to be able to carry out his profession properly? (Vinken & Van Kampen)

HOW TO FIX THE WORLD
Jacqueline Goss/USA-Uzbekistan 2004, video, colour, sound, 28 min
How To Fix The World is a digitally animated video adapted from Soviet psychologist A.R. Luria’s research in Central Asia in the 1930s. In Luria’s book ‘Cognitive Development: Its Social and Cultural Foundations’, the author presents data collected from three years of interviews with Uzbek and Kyrgyz farmers who lived on or near the Soviet-sponsored collective farms in the 1930s. During this time, the Soviets introduced literacy programs into these primarily Muslim oral-based agricultural communities. Interested in documenting the cognitive changes that people experience when learning to read, Luria also captured the cultural conflict of Soviet Socialism and Islam. In How To Fix The World, the conversations transcribed into Luria’s book are brought to life via simple animation techniques. Max Penson’s photographs of the collective farms serve as the visual model for the animations and they play against a backdrop of landscape images shot in Central Asia in 2004. At once humorous, conflicting and revelatory, these conversations between Luria and his subjects illustrate a particular historical moment when one culture attempted to transform another in the name of education and modernization. The subtleties of this transformation are found in the words exchanged and documented seventy years ago. (Jacqueline Goss)
www.jacquelinegoss.com

WILD BOY
Guy Ben-Ner/Israel-USA 2004, video, colour, sound, 17 min
Wild Boy tells the story of a wild child and his educator, a story of power relations and the fantasy of bringing somebody up after one’s own image. It is the story of every parent-child rearing, but more than that, it is a story of a director and his child-actor, raising the question of what it means to direct a child, to contain a child inside a fixed frame, to command him in and out of the frame (as if it is his private room). On another level, it also raises the possibility of looking at early cinema (the “cinema of attractions” as was coined by Tom Gunning), as a mute wild child that was tamed, eventually, by language (sound, narrative). Wild Boy is based on several case histories, some myths, some educational manuals and refers to a wide range of movies, from old photos left of the vaudeville acts by father and son Buster and Joe Keaton, through Truffaut’s Wild Child to The Kid by Chaplin. (Guy Ben-Ner)

LEGAL ERRORIST
Chris Haring & Mara Mattuschka, Austria, 2005, video, colour, sound, 15 min
A performance of transformation, a transformance, changes its medium and encounters a camera, which plays dance music – under the secret eye of a room that bends and twists along with it. The Legal Errorist – personified by the dancer Stephanie Cumming – is a creature that cannot stop crashing. The sudden overpowering by the ‘error’, the system error, engenders the creature’s obsession. She commences with great relish through a series of transformations; that which hits upon the limits of a simple machine serves as a learning program for the Legal Errorist. Film and performance – parallel projection or articulated interference? Massively, like a mountain, the body of the Errorist falls to the floor and lands with an obstinate sound whose source seems remote from anything human. As though she were her own director, she speaks animatedly with numerous invisible colleagues. She speaks to the microphone, not through it: an eerie animated world of objects, which become fellow creatures when one creature cannot categorise herself precisely. “What?!?” roars the Legal Errorist defiantly – as though to a higher being in the dark and not the diffuse collective of the audience. And she begins to lure the gaze through the catalogue of her body parts. The voyeur’s fatally bundled attention seems inverse to the body set against it, anamorphically distorted by the extremely wide- angled lens. Does this gaze document a foul subjectivity or does this closed world look back as its own lens? The camera is a shrewd ally in the counterattack launched by the body on display. (Katherina Zakravsky)

TUNED
Oliver Pietsch, Germany, 2004, video, colour, sound, 14 min
Portraits of people consuming drugs taken from film history are edited together in rapid succession. All appear radically isolated, their inward-looking eyes looking out from the screen, appearing helpless and disorientated. Their trip alternates between giggling lust and panicked anxiety, turning increasingly into blank horror. The paradox: In these edited sequences, the crazed and overwrought figures once again build a community whose unifying core is the flight from the community and the search for the true self in itself. The film can here be understood as a metonym for western culture. (Ute Vorkoeper)

MOUSE HEAVEN
Kenneth Anger, USA, 2005, video, colour, sound, 10 min
It’s a study of animated toys of a rare nature. These are collectables of early Walt Disney toys. I’ve always loved Mickey Mouse since I was a little boy and I’m outraged about the current Disney company’s attitude to Mickey Mouse. I mean they think they own it, but all the children of the world own Mickey Mouse. And I have devised a way to star Mickey Mouse in a film that the current Disney company can’t legally object to, by filming an antique toy collection of early Disney toys. And it’s just a coincidence all those toys happen to be Mickey Mouse. I’m actually being very respectful of early Mickey Mouse. I hate later Mickey Mouse, because from Fantasia on, the Disney people decided to humanise the mouse, remove his tail – which is a kind of castration – and turn him into a little boy who is a sort of a goody-two-shoes. And he’s no longer the mischievous, sadistic mouse that he was in the beginning. He used to do nasty little tricks like twist the udders of cows and things like that. And that’s the only mouse I’m interested in, this kind of demon ‘fetish’ figure. (Kenneth Anger)

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