Dreamful Slumbers – 05
January 23rd, 2012
Microscope Gallery release:
SUBLIMATED VIOLENCE & VISUAL EXCESS
James Fotopoulos and Laura Parnes in person
screening together for the first time
MONDAY JANUARY 23, 7PM
Admission $6
In connection with the current exhibition “Dreamful Slumbers” drawings and videos by James Fotopoulos, we present a unique screening and visual dialogue between Fotopoulos’ 16mm film “The Nest” (2003) and the video “Blood and Guts in High School” (2006) by Laura Parnes. The two acclaimed filmmakers have never before screened together, but have over the years recognized their shared interest in themes and approaches including formal film, narrative structures and genre. In these earlier works “The Nest” and “Blood and Guts in High School” both employ stylized dialog and acting to create highly charged worlds of psychosexual drama, sublimated violence and visual excess. The two are now collaborating on a feature, Ten Ways of Doing Time, which resurrects these concepts in a prison drama with science fiction motifs that explores codes of repression and domination through the framework of the experimental narrative.
PROGRAM
“Blood & Guts in High School”
By Laura Parnes
video, color, sound, 40 minutes 2006
“Blood and Guts in High School” features actress Stephanie Vella in a series of video installations that re-imagine punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker’s book of the same title. The book received notoriety from 1978-1982 during the rise of Reagan republicanism and the emergence of punk rock. In Parnes’ interpretation, each video-chapter presents a typical scene in the life of Janie bracketed by US news events from the time period in which the book was written.
“Filmed on bare-bones sets put together in gallery spaces, the video is a model of how to bring off an ambitions project with scant resources, and also of how to respect source material while transforming it. And where Acker’s novels have a quick-hit crash-and-burn intensity, Ms. Parnes’s video floats like a shark, forever hovering, but always watching and moving.”-Holland Cotter, New York Times
“The sets are elegantly austere, the framing remarkably succinct. (Parnes’s favorite shot is a claustrophobic high-angle close-up that places Janie’s antagonist in the frame over her shoulder.) Each line of dialogue is cushioned by an arch pause. There are no interruptions; everything is given due space.” David Velasco, Artforum
“The Nest”
by James Fotopoulos
2003, 16mm, 78min, color, sound mono
Filmed in saturated colors on out-of-date film stocks with an aggressive soundtrack, the story of The Nest is told – the marriage of two young professionals unravels after an unnamed accident physically and emotional traumatizes the wife. Government agents, shadowy investigators and transgender beings appear, trying to solve the nervous-breakdown-mystery of secret alien forces that chose the couple as their target. In-camera tricks, drawings, derelict optical printing, miniatures, puppets and prosthetic makeup effects convey the dual collapse of the protagonists’ lives and the film structure as one unified entity.
“The Nest’s physiological and psychological are one and the same, perhaps making it his most nakedly emotional feature yet, and firmly positioning his narrative work in that slender alternate stream inhabited by filmmakers like Bresson, Warhol, and (in the right mood) Sokhurov. In the coolness of its surface construction, its sly wit, and the surprising heat of its emotions, The Nest suggests that other great suburban tract of the ‘80s, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, but rather than being about a toxic airborne event, The Nest simply is one.” (Spencer Parsons, Cinematexas)
“Chicago-based underground cinema whizkid James Fotopoulos (who, at age 27, has created more than 90 films and videos of varying lengths) offers up a bleak and cryptically funny assault on suburban anomie in his latest, The Nest. … Fotopoulos creeps around the edges of character and drama, conjuring moods of paranoia and dread that suggest the carefully ordered routines of daily life are a kind of opiate administered by sinister forces. Shooting in harsh 16mm color, Fotopoulos renders The Nest in a typically Spartan, forbidding style that makes it seem as though he is some extraterrestrial visitor photographing humans for the first time, interrupted only by pockets of crude, stick-figure animation and intricately layered superimpositions. Fittingly, soundtrack eschews a conventional musical score in favor of industrial sounds that form their own kind of whirring, grating symphony.” – Scott Foundas, Variety
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Entry Filed under: Dreamful Slumbers