Program 4: First Person
55th New York Film Festival
September 29 - October 15, 2017
Sara Magenheimer’s Art and Theft, Jaakko Pallasvuo’s Filter, Steve Reinke’s Semen Is the Piss of Dreams, Wojciech Bąkowski’s Year, and Charlotte Prodger’s BRIDGIT
Q&A with Steve Reinke following the screening on 10/7
Art and Theft
Sara Magenheimer, USA, 2017, 7m
World Premiere
Magenheimer’s video explores the bounds of narrative and the illusion of received wisdom in the seven minutes and twenty-two seconds it takes to rob a house. Here, images of medieval art, popular cinema, and “live” news reportage speak candidly to the constructedness of all storytelling traditions.
Filter
Jaakko Pallasvuo, Finland/USA/Germany, 2017, 25m
World Premiere
Mixing crude animation, 3D modeling, and faux filmic textures in a self-reflexive essay on digitally abetted nostalgia, this playful work of fair use pastiche refracts all manner of postmodern touchstones (David Foster Wallace, Talking Heads, Reality Bites) into an aesthetic interrogation of its own methodology, resulting in, to paraphrase one onscreen subject, a critique of a critique of a critique.
Semen Is the Piss of Dreams
Steve Reinke, USA/Canada, 2016, 7m
In Reinke’s latest provocation, the words of author Hervé Guibert are made flesh through a montage of “human events” that work to collapse the boundaries between the private and public, the perverse and the prosaic.
Year
Wojciech Bąkowski, Poland, 2017, 6m
World Premiere
Bakowski’s strangely personal, nostalgia-laced video combines the Polish animator’s love of everyday domestic objects and geometric aesthetics with a flickering synth score out of an eighties urban crime film.
BRIDGIT
Charlotte Prodger, U.K., 2016, 32m
Prodger examines queer identity and time in this first-person essay film, shot in and around the Scottish Highlands and named after the eponymous Neolithic deity, whose name has numerous iterations depending on life stage, locality and point in history.
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