Program 30: Scott Stark – The Realist

Etienne’s Hand (Richard Touhy, Australia, 2011, 12:34m)
Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und Wahrheit) (Peter Kubelka, 2003, 13m)
A Serpente (Sandro Aguilar, Portugal, 2005, 15m)
The Realist (Scott Stark, USA, 2013, 40m)

The Realist (Scott Stark, USA, 2013, 40m)
The Realist is an experimental and highly abstracted melodrama, a “doomed love story” storyboarded with flickering still photographs, peopled with department store mannequins, and located in the visually heightened universe of clothing displays, fashion islands and storefront windows. It's a soaring visual romp peppered with turgid melodramatic moments, flickering visual rhythms that border on abstraction, and seductive images of commercial products with their dubious promises of physical nourishment and fashionable allure. In the process, It examines our own relationship to consumerist culture: we see in these commercial displays idealized, pre-packaged renderings of our own needs, desires and identities. Perhaps on some level we, too, communicate and define ourselves in the same way that the mannequins do; we are what we buy. –S.S.   October 6 at 9:45pm (FBT)