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THE \u2018I\u2019 AND THE \u2018WE\u2019
\nSaturday 27 October 2007, at 2pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT3<\/b><\/p>\n
Su Friedrich, Seeing Red, USA, 2005, 27 min<\/b>
\nA video confessional in which the artist expresses her frustration with the onset of middle age, frankly declaring personal anxieties. Interspersed with observational vignettes edited to Bach\u2019s Goldberg Variations (played by Glenn Gould), Seeing Red is ultimately less an admission of crisis than a roar of defiance.<\/p>\n
Elodie Pong, Je Suis Une Bombe, Switzerland, 2006, 7 min<\/b>
\nUnprecedented and absolute: The image of a young woman \u2018simultaneously strong and vulnerable, a potential powder keg.\u2019<\/p>\n
Jay Rosenblatt, I Just Wanted to Be Somebody, USA, 2006, 10 min<\/b>
\nAmerican pop singer Anita Bryant, the face of Florida orange juice, led a political crusade against the \u2018evil forces\u2019 of homosexuality in the 1970s. Local success was short lived, and a national boycott of Florida oranges was the first sign of her loss of public approval.<\/p>\n
Steve Reinke, Regarding the Pain of Susan Sontag (Notes on Camp), Canada, 2006, 4 min<\/b>
\nA journey from schoolyard to graveyard, with author Susan Sontag as philosophical guide.<\/p>\n
Mara Mattuschka & Chris Haring, Part Time Heroes, Austria, 2007, 33 min<\/b> THE \u2018I\u2019 AND THE \u2018WE\u2019 SEEING RED JE SUIS UNE BOMBE I JUST WANTED TO BE SOMEBODY REGARDING THE PAIN OF SUSAN SONTAG (NOTES ON CAMP) PART TIME HEROES
\nMattuschka\u2019s second adaptation of a piece by Vienna\u2019s ingenious Liquid Loft (following Legal Errorist in 2004) exposes a trio of fractured characters. In the lonely hearts hotel of an unfamiliar zone, the amorphous heroes erratically construct and reveal their unconventional personas<\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>
\n<\/b><\/b>Saturday 27 October 2007, at 2pm
\nLondon BFI Southbank NFT3<\/p>\n
\nSu Friedrich, USA, 2005, video, colour, sound, 27 min<\/b>
\nSu Friedrich created her latest experimental documentary, the half-hour Seeing Red<\/i>, from just three elements: video diaries, shot from the chin down, in which she wears a red top; seemingly aleatory footage, often taken on the sly, of red things found on streets, in parks, or in backyards; and snatches of Glenn Gould\u2019s rendition of Bach\u2019s \u2018Goldberg Variations\u2019. At times, red bits of the world dance ecstatically to Gould\u2019s cascading keys. Alone, to her camera, Friedrich confesses a string of related fears: Having turned 50, she faces the stubborn constancy of her self-identified \u2018control freak\u2019 patterns and insecurities and wonders if she still has time to change for the better. Friedrich is one of the most accomplished avant-garde filmmakers of her generation, with a career of films and videos whose masterful construction and precise beauty attest to the positive aspects of her self-criticism, and her stature only makes the humbling existential crises in Seeing Red<\/i> more poignant. Yet she has always found ways to create beauty that resist the illusion of transcendence by sticking close to the grounds of hard reality \u2013 an influence and logical extension of her feminist politics. (Ed Halter, Village Voice)
\n www.sufriedrich.com<\/a><\/p>\n
\nElodie Pong, Switzerland, 2006, video, colour, sound, 7 min<\/b>
\nIn her video Je suis une bombe<\/i>, which is part of the \u2018Supernova\u2019 cycle, Elodie Pong presents a young woman wearing a panda bear costume who dances and writhes around a pole, in the manner of striptease performers. At the end of the performance, the young woman takes off her panda head and, holding it in her hand, moves towards the camera. Repeatedly and with a sense of urgency, she says \u2018Je suis une bombe\u2019, as if she needed to convince herself of her own peculiarity. In her videos Pong paints a kaleidoscopic picture of her own generation which she has pegged as narcissistic, searching, and performance-oriented. She remains a bit aloof, but never severs the ties with her protagonists \u2013 she knows, after all, that she herself is deeply involved. The body becomes the carrier of communication. This is not surprising as it is mainly the body which shapes our identity today. Pong tries to capture the reality of a generation by juxtaposing the subjective and the objective, as well as the real and the illusionary. The artist runs the entire gamut of contemporary emotions, and underneath some innocuous looking surfaces she discovers the depths of a silent world drowned out by ambient noise. (Kunsthaus Baselland)<\/p>\n
\nJay Rosenblatt, USA, 2006, video, colour, sound, 10 min<\/b>
\n\u2018I believe, more than ever before, that there are evil forces round about us. Maybe even disguised as something good.\u2019 These are the ironic words of the former beauty queen Anita Bryant, who became the face of homophobia in the United States in the 1970s. In I Just Wanted to Be Somebody<\/i>, director Jay Rosenblatt sketches a portrait as funny as it is serious of the woman who unleashed the first public controversy over civil rights for homosexuals in 1977 by leading a successful local campaign against them. \u2018In Florida, you won the battle, but lost the war. You gave a face to fear and ignorance\u2019 was the response that Fenton Johnson, a gay American writer, wrote in a letter to her as an invitation to keep the debate alive. Rosenblatt creates comic effects by combining the public appearances in which Bryant warns against gay love with commercials that have her singing the praises of orange juice and vitamin C. But in no way does this make the danger of fear and ignorance any less recognisable. I Just Wanted to Be Somebody<\/i> takes a stand for the importance of a discussion that Bryant is no longer willing to participate in. She lost her career and her family, but not her convictions. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)
\nwww.jayrosenblattfilms.com<\/a><\/p>\n
\nSteve Reinke, Canada, 2006, video, colour, sound, 4 min<\/b>
\nThis short video gets its name from two pieces of writing by Susan Sontag: her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others, a meditation on empathy and the photograph as document; and the highly influential essay, now close to fifty years old, Notes on Camp. Sontag\u2019s work often questions photography\u2019s ability to elicit empathy within the viewer. She analyzes whether personal topics, such as gender and disease, can be addressed given the vast dissemination of photographic images. Outed in the invite as a rehabilitation of the \u2018tired indexicality of photograph\u2019, Regarding the Pain of Susan Sontag (Notes on Camp)<\/i>, shows images that evoke a contemporary emotional ground zero, combined with Reinke\u2019s pithy voice-over narration. (LUX)
\nwww.myrectumisnotagrave.com<\/a><\/p>\n
\nMara Mattuschka, Chris Haring, Austria, 2007, video, colour, sound, 33 min<\/b>
\nThe search for fame\u2019s elevator goes up and down, the ego\u2019s bust and boom. Each character is isolated in his or her anachronistic, film-star dressing room, left alone, subjected to the sinister fittings: a hopelessly out-dated microphone, radio, crutches for communication. Each character gets a small chance to show that he or she alone is better at embodying that self, which is just as good as every other self. However, as though it were an uncanny copy machine of star production, the golden room, which houses the greatest striptease talent \u2013 since she constantly undress yet is never naked \u2013 generates a momentary double. The film checks these beings, isolated through their hero competition, into the lonely heart hotel where they eavesdrop on one another through thin walls, often over a film cut. Frivolous encounters slip in. A helplessly obscene seduction attempt mutates to telephone terror, confirmed by the humorous play of the eyes from the other side. From out of the elevator, an elevator technician \u2013 a show master, so to speak, a running gag, a lascivious \u2018cursor\u2019 in a boiler suit \u2013 creeps down the hallways. He alone seems to connect everything, but finds no one. Until the final take, a generous long shot in which all three heroes are left to their own showcases, whereby they attempt all together, each alone, to seduce their audience. Yet unimpressed passers-by give our heroes the cold shoulder, making the camera on the other side of the street their only audience. The Oseifabrik, furnished with technology from days gone by, lends eccentric historicity to one of the programmatic statements: \u2018How do I become timeless?\u2019 that releases this outcry for fame in a hopeless but unique vitality. (Katherina Zakravsky)<\/p>\n