Posts filed under 'Dreamful Slumbers'
Written for the “Dreamful Slumbers” exhibition
Originally appeared on Microscope Gallery Blog “Now What”
http://www.microscopegallery.com/?page_id=4700
DREAMFUL SLUMBERS
By James Fotopoulos
Drawing for the video Chimera (2011), charcoal, graphite, pencil, Conté crayon, pastel on Bristol vellum paper
From “Dreamful Slumbers”:
In a horrible dreamful slumber;
Like the linked infernal chain;
A vast Spine writh’d in torment
Upon the winds; shooting pain’d
Ribs, like a bending cavern
And bones of solidness, froze
Over all his nerves of joy.
And a first Age passed over,
And a state of dismal woe.
(William Blake, The Book of Urizen)
The title of this show comes from a take on the line from William Blake’s The (First) Book of Urizen (1794). There are a number of ways in which I can expand upon his work, but the truth is that the line entered my mind with little complexity: I was thinking of the year I created the first cluster of drawing presented in the exhibition (2008). I was living in my studio, up through the night, working on these drawings among other things. It was a murky void. A self made trap I was working out of and Urizen came to mind.
There are many paths I can go down when discussing Blake: the merger of words and image, his own myths, the sprawling epics battling out his philosophies and histories. It all greatly appeals to me, but what I think about most are his ideas on the image – the bold lines of the form separated from the natural world and his method of engraving, where he used his corrosive etching technique (dissolving away the unwanted metal to reveal the image) to put into action his own thoughts of the human and the soul (the form separated from the chaos of nature).
Why I think this interested me is that I tried to avoid working with materials present here in the show for about seven years. I did not want to work in charcoal or any type of pastel.
For years I drew in graphite and ink and for a period did watercolors (since it was really drawing based). I was trying to match the image that I achieved in my video work, but translate it into a frozen object – basic and primitive.
Watercolor was very stable; the technique was unchanged for centuries, but it did not capture what I had achieved in the texture and chaos of video layering, which I wanted to shroud around the representative forms – mainly human bodies and animals. I needed the pieces of the forms to stand in a shadowy inner stew of color, filth, and symbols. Only the combinations of charcoal, graphite and pastels captured this. I rejected it, hated it (and still do) – but finally in 2008 succumbed to it.
I felt I had matured or peaked with my video image by 2008 (or achieved a sense of ease with the image). With The Sky Song (2007), I had started to become fatigued with the use of CGI animation but couldn’t completely let go yet – so I tried to bleed together parts of the computer figures with the actors in an attempt to make uniquely mutant images. I also used the computer figures as looping animations or spinning backgrounds – in a sense attempting in the crudest and quickest (aesthetically “worse”) way possible to push the software completely into the “other” or strange.”
Stills from the video The Sky Song (James Fotopoulos, 2007)
What I mean by “peaked” is not encompassed by one complete video work, but by a shot or moment of a shot within a video, it was a general sense of feeling that I wanted to transfer over from one medium to the next. For example, the low-fi color and re-taped slow moving video textures clashed with the hard digital lines and pixels in a piece like The River (2002) for only a few moments achieves this. In a sense take the “peak” of that video image, and freeze it as a singular image-object on paper. But where in video it was done with advance technology – the key now was to do it in the most primitive tools (but more advanced as “image” since the physical drawing was part of a longer history) – the pyramid base being the drawing with paper and charcoal on paper and tip being digital video a control over both the unconscious impulses (the chaos) and control over the conscious “action” of art-making – controlling one’s skill – the craft. What was I since the start? The answer – a draughtsman – on paper, or with a video camera. It didn’t matter.
Around 2009 I began to more heavily prepare my films. I had always in various ways sketched and boarded my work, but my experience on some larger projects lead me to define for myself what existed or didn’t exist as an “idea” in film production. For me, preparation had to intensify and function as an equal to the finished projects and this began with the Epsilon Indi (2009), The Unknown Collaboration (2009), Alice in Wonderland (2010) and then all since
(In my drawings this would operate as elements of technical preparation or sketch would bleed into finished drawings – the boundaries collapsed … Is a sketch more alive as an idea than the completed work?)
I began to draw every aspect of the films and try to make each drawing stand on its own – so if a film collapsed, the concept existed. So lets say if a film didn’t get made – it was made on paper and lived in sketch (in the shadows). Some of those ideas might float into another project or it would simply exist as drawings within my life-narrative of work.
Sketches for the video Epsilon Indi (James Fotopoulos, 2008)
From my essay Thoughts on Tron:
“A constant that has remained with me through my life is my interest in special effects, animation and puppetry. I enjoy works that are complete synthetic universes of effects the most. Counter to the popular trend to control production by collapsing the different productions phases into one via computers (which is a positive development if understood and managed properly – the phases always bled together, but now they can exist as a whole – a great advancement – when I draw, I draw as a whole). Much filmmaking hinges on how well one collects the various pieces of production and then arranges them to fall together – sometimes it all works, but most often it does not. Usually only certain parts of a film work. Now in the digital era, filmmaking has returned fully to the drawing impulse. For a while there was a separation – where only elements of that drawing ability could make it into a film if one had the skill to impose that graphic ability into the space of the production. But there was a distance then, now it is more immediate – where films have become so processed and constructed (the nature of editing is so fluid – like holding a pen) – the psychology of the animator, the FX person, the designer are now the dominate force at play in production and bleed into one master role.”
When I was a child I saw an exhibition of Jim Henson’s puppets at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. In a way, it has remained the most ideal exhibition I have ever seen. It housed objects created for his television shows and films – objects that had achieved life within his narrative universe. These were not made simply for the audio-visual medium to transmit them merely to be sold. They were not secondary pieces to the films’ whole, but existed both as totally complete objects and operated as puzzle pieces in his film medium’s grammar: they functioned as parts of his whole narrative universe both within a film and through the totality of his life work – his narrative – and thus warranted exhibition. Their value was achieved through a more complex, slower process. It possessed the same psychology like stumbling upon an Egyptian tomb. But most importantly, they were made to be props or puppets in films not “art objects” – the art-object was accomplished by the inclusive nature of his productions, combined with a life-work and the slow march of time changing the perception of how we as a collective view the medium.
When I was a child I saw an exhibition of Jim Henson’s puppets at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. In a way, it has remained the most ideal exhibition I have ever seen. It housed objects created for his television shows and films – objects that had achieved life within his narrative universe. These were not made simply for the audio-visual medium to transmit them merely to be sold. They were not secondary pieces to the films’ whole, but existed both as totally complete objects and operated as puzzle pieces in his film medium’s grammar: they functioned as parts of his whole narrative universe both within a film and through the totality of his life work – his narrative – and thus warranted exhibition. Their value was achieved through a more complex, slower process. It possessed the same psychology like stumbling upon an Egyptian tomb. But most importantly, they were made to be props or puppets in films not “art objects” – the art-object was accomplished by the inclusive nature of his productions, combined with a life-work and the slow march of time changing the perception of how we as a collective view the medium.
Sketches for the video Alice in Wonderland (James Fotopoulos, 2009)
Through my own experience I felt the “film production” in its very nature was more “conceptual” than most “conceptual” art I was seeing in galleries. The conceptual was dead at this point, it was time to take the surviving remnants and move on into a neo-manerism.
he Thing (1982) somewhat refined these thoughts, although in a way devoid of the individual-artist-style per say, but more so as a result of the aging of the medium. I couldn’t see the props merely as props – but through a combination of time, distance and the growing archaic nature of the film’s techniques – the special effects became like sculptures to me. Although they were never intended to be, but through the strength of the movie’s unified whole, the mastery of its assembly (same with Alien) and the nature of time, made the film operate in my mind like a “cold-dead-unfolding-process” (I cannot watch films, especially the older they get, in any other way = they are like alien objects to me – only in the “parts,” the understanding of construction, can I find powerful emotional value or gain wisdom or metaphor – only through this technical world can I understand what it is to be “the other” as in what another’s life may be) – these creatures stood out of the piece by masterfully and equally operating as part of the whole and when thrust up again the medium’s decay with time, when the machinery became exposed – the tension of these two forces created something worthy “Object to be displayed.” As that of Giger’s image-style-path or Henson’s whole universe in his dedication and output.
A few years later I was asked to do an installation about female symbolism in Egyptian and Flemish art called The Mirror Mask (2005) for the Contour Biennial of Video Art in Mechelen, Belgium. I rejected the notion that the final mode of it has to be contingent upon the space alone. That unless photographed, that photograph became the object (like looking at shows of photographs of performances – the performance is not there, the photograph becomes the art-object, but yet whole shows will be focused on “performance” or “action” based on these objects. I do not believe performance is art – it is a shard of a tribal human process. Human beings have evolved to be able to take that primal somewhat religious human action and freeze it into a synthetic form. It is fine to go back to it – but I don’t feel it is fine to call it art). I created each piece within the space to stand independently, but still work as a whole and also have the ability to mutate to any space. In other words – abide by the space, try to make the work as its own singular piece, but compliment or link with the other pieces (videos or drawings), twist and conform to the space’s design and architecture but yet, most importantly, in the end stand on its own. So if this work moved into to a different space – the pieces can just be reworked to fit = but never lose their individual uniqueness.
Stills from the video The Mirror Mask (James Fotopoulos, 2005)
I wanted the singular object not unified by space through installation. In the end I felt that that final piece was more like an act of interior design not art (it was still too complicated in space), so I reedited all the video pieces of The Mirror Mask, into a singular feature length piece.
Ultimately all these ideas hinged upon my death – I wanted my work to be “democratic in death.” Each piece to carry its own weight that when I am dead can be simply handled as a body of work that all operates as life-narrative where there is no question about the singularity of any of the pieces – films, video tape, words on paper, drawings. Do with I what you may – but the threads connect and perhaps evolved into to a style (or styles) and ideas that reflect like a mirror, a life.
One never knows if any of what they make will amount to anything. The deal of doing this work is living in a state of unknowing = it can all amount to a waste of time. Which becomes the life-force of the act, but the act itself is not enough. The act must lead to the synthetic that stands separate from one’s decaying being and slowing actions. But at least the risk can be taken to not muddle it in a cloud of “Installation-tech-confusion.” In a way, shedding the tech-obsession that is simply re-hashing old conceptual ideas in a new package, and accept what is inherent in media production, that the markets are going to force changes upon you, which has nothing to do with art, and force a constant state of re-learning – and only when the technology become obsolete, in its death, does it become relevant to explore and attempt to elevate into a tool of art. I want to come to a work and simply by welcoming it, be challenged by the complexity of it construction at its very root use of the language – that direct, that intense, that simple. When creating, only when simple in the objective of the final piece could I unleash the epic sprawling vulgar chaos of the imagination. The advancement of technology brought me back to what was important in production – the basic, almost craft-like or homemade approach in writing and drawing – in particular, the “hand of the draftsman. A draftsman with words or images on paper and video.
James Fotopoulos, 2012
Below: Drawing for the video Alice in Wonderland (James Fotopoulos, 2010)
March 1st, 2012
Install
February 15th, 2012
http://www.vimeo.com/36003018
Brief excerpt from a more than 2 hour conversation on 1.22.12 between James Fotopoulos and Rebecca Cleman of EAI about the “Dreamful Slumbers” exhibit at Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn. Exhibition dates: Jan 7 to February 6, 2012.
February 8th, 2012
http://www.microscopegallery.com/?page_id=4744
THE SKY SONG
Video by James Fotopoulus
MONDAY FEBRUARY 6, 7PM
Admission $6 – Artist in Person
On the final night of the current exhibition Dreamful Slumbers: drawings and videos, James Fotopoulos will present his 2007 video “The Sky Song”, a Western-style feature about revenge. In this work, Fotopoulos incorporates special effects, costumes, charcoal and primitive computer drawings with actors’ performances. The “Sky Song” lays the foundation for further incorporation of hand drawn images in his later films.
“The Sky Song, like other Fotopoulos films and videos, is something I won’t soon forget. In short, it makes Inland Empire look like Apollo 13…notable largely for image-manipulated actors performing wooden script readings of a disturbed Western punctuated by psychosexual bloodlettings, primitive 3-D computer graphics of naked bodies and childlike drawings, and a series of flashed icons ranging from barnyard animals to an array of fruit. The word ‘nightmare’ could describe The Sky Song, but not easily: it’s an indescribable experience…” — Indiewire
The Sky Song
2007, Video, color, sound stereo, 127 min
In the old West, a man’s family is slain by his doppelganger: Mr. Lamb. The man’s quest for revenge takes him on a journey to reconcile the horrors of his past – illness, murder, lost love and war. The story’s action is told through stilted theatrical black box performances, crude CGI special effects, Halloween costumes and primitive drawings of animals, plants, sex, baseball, and sea life.
February 6th, 2012
The Nest
http://www.microscopegallery.com/?page_id=4926
(Written for the screening at the Microscope Gallery 1/23/12)
I first attempted to make The Nest (2003) along with my second script Esophagus (2004) in the late 90s while in post-production on my second feature Migrating Forms (1999). Both efforts fell apart and the two pre-productions mutated into what would become my film Back Against the Wall (2000).
The film stemmed from an idea that if one member of a marriage suffered through a traumatic experience (in this case the wife) – could the partner sublimate the energy of the event or would the psychic forces be so powerful to destroy the union. Along with this was an idea of human beings projecting a rationalized illusive reality and lurking behind it, the true reality, existing as powerful swirling chaos. The ability to function in everyday life is by creating an external phantom-order to one’s inner state. But what if the internal symbols shatter through that order? And not just unconscious manifestations, but literally – as if collective symbols (or creatures) penetrate through a holographic wall-of-order. As tension in one’s life mounts – these objects or beings swirling in a parallel dimension of uncontained freedom break through into the world’s consensual reality.
Around 2000 a friend was helping me with the optical printing on Back Against the Wall and mentioned that he possessed some ruined Kodak film stock. His freezer had broken down that summer and melted ice all over the unexposed film. It was the phased out 500-ASA stocks, which had been replaced by the Vision stocks. A chip test had been done and it determined the gamma was messed up, so he was going to dispose of the ruined 45 minutes. I told him I would take it and from this damaged outdated unexposed negative, I began to structure the visuals of The Nest = I isolated the narrative’s inner-world on this film and then spun the rest of structure outward from there, using fresh new film stocks.
I took about six months building the props and piecing the film’s pre-production together (which was my usual time-frame in this period). Simultaneously I was putting together my feature Families (2002), which was a much different type of film (large cast, black-and-white, many locations), but I doubled up and bled together the resources between both films and in late October of 2001 shot Families (2002). Then using the same crew and equipment in early December, The Nest was shot in six days.
After completion of post-production on Families, I went to work throughout 2002 on The Nest’s optical effects and sound.
By this time I had been working extensively in video and for me the gulf between the two productions methods, video vs. film, where becoming vaster.
So with The Nest I wanted to make a total “film-work” to counter the video process.
A “complete film” in a way, drawing upon all the physical methods that were the opposite of what I was doing with video. I think of the idea as “end-to-end” and by that I mean literally: cutting film end-to-end, sound tape end-to-end and leaving it at that – and in-between those ends, is where the energy would take place = in the film-space, the production-space = all textures had to be consciously created during production or using methods such as in-camera effects (I had been doing this naturally on my prior film works, but now wanted to do it very deliberately and with total awareness). No timing, no sound mixing – but yet still achieving and controlling all the effects and filmic manipulation I wanted. And in a sense, an element of the video psychology crept it = the layering – which I never did as much with on film, but had been doing quite heavily in video. But this time by double exposing the film in-camera (as well as other film techniques), thus thrusting the video layering up against the blocky heavy film grammar and production.
(I initially was going to shoot Christabel [2001] on film, but the extent to which I wanted to superimpose the image would have destroyed the 16mm negative in the optical printing process – so I shifted the majority of the piece to video)
To fuse and equate the psychology of the film grammar with that of the subject, I wanted the film to fall apart by the third reel. Lending to this idea of a “complete film” the reels were the exact size of my Steenbeck-platter and were structured to collapse systematically and slowly over the first two. By the third reel, I didn’t even want it to be graceful = just badly fall apart
The drawings and paintings in the film were by the animator Jim Tranior. I had drawn out images for him to re-draw and paint. He asked me why I didn’t just draw them myself – I explained that at this time I didn’t want something so basic and personal as a drawing of my own to appear in the film’s world. I needed someone else’s drawing within the space of the film – as if it broke into the atmosphere I was creating (I felt I was “drawing” with the film pieces, the grammar – therefore I couldn’t have a literal physical drawing of my own appear within that). I felt an affinity with Jim’s work, so I thought it was both different enough from my own imagery, but with enough of a thread of similarity to make his style’s appearance feel natural within the film’s whole.
(From my essay on Sound):
The Nest (2003) was the culmination of a many things …
In terms of sound – I wanted to not go through a mix at all. I imagined like early sound films doing everything on stage = when an orchestra would play the music live during the filming of the scenes. I set out to create complete “machine work” of image and sound. I just wanted to cut the magnetic tape end to end – which is what I did. Everything as much as possible was to be done in camera or in the recording – and just having the lab run off the final print un-timed (all exposures final in camera), magnetic tape no mix with splices transferred to the optical. I handed Zack a list of sounds to collect (ie. laughing man, mice in paper bags, etc.) We would create atmospheres on the four-track and then dump them to magnetic tape. It was the total divorce of sound and image operating as different collapsing universes – a series of images that fell apart and a soundtrack that fell apart with it. There is no true synch in the film – because at the time I was thinking that that there was no true synch in real life … so why have it in a film? This film also could be the most vivid realization of the Welles interest – for example in a film like Mr. Arkadin (1955) where the sound is a flat perspectiveless derelict world – related to the image, but slightly separated – with it own technical logic. The Nest builds on this.
James Fotopoulos
February 3rd, 2012
Originally posted on Cine Soiree 1/15/12
http://cinesoiree.blogspot.com/2012/01/snow-and-fotopoulos.html
Snow and Fotopoulos
Many events all concurrent with one another: Occupy Cinema at Anthology, and the openings for Michael Snow at Jack Shainman Gallery, and James Fotopoulos at Microscope Gallery. Attended both the Snow and Fotopoulos shows — but it can sometimes be difficult being too many places all at once.
Tempting to draw comparisons between the two exhibits of artwork by filmmakers, but what was truly striking by way of comparison: issue of space — that is to say, the available square footage of gallery space — and its influence upon the grandly minimal arrangement at the Chelsea exhibit, with its cavernous white expanses, or the intimate and abundantly covered walls — seeking to maximize the miniscule — in Bushwick’s aptly named Microscope Gallery. Is larger space the ideal? The hanging of the Fotopoulos show invited the perusing of the drawings through a meandering of the eye from one work to the next: up, down, this work to the side, and that work above or below, making sequences and comparisons through a zigzagging from one drawing to another. A larger space might not have been as conducive this type of hanging: Perhaps an eye-level ribbon of drawings — providing a more linear experience — would have been more appropriate to a large space?
Intimate spaces seem to have been increasing within the past few years: Microscope, Spectacle Theater, and even the storefront-located Union Docs, all functioning within small-sized spaces of one sort or another (compared to the full-sized theater seating 100 or more). The little Maya Deren Theater (which seats 72) on the ground floor of Anthology seems cavernous compared to these more recent venues. Of course Bradley Eros’s E.P.I.C. = E(xtreme) P(rivate) I(ntimate) C(inema), in which several screenings took place for an audience of exactly one, may be the ultimate example of this small-sized venue (or perhaps the Edison Kinetoscope, which by its nature can have no more than one viewer at a time?).
***
And so begins the new year and a new year of Cine Soirees as the blog is now one year old.
Cheers!
January 30th, 2012
http://hyperallergic.com/45290/james-fotopulous-microscope-gallery/
Films Born Out of Drawings
by Katarína Hybenová on January 19, 2012
The entrance to Microscope Gallery on St. Charles Place. (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)
After much media ado about the birth as performance art by Marni Kotak, you have to wonder if the wild media-saturated waters around Microscope Gallery calmed down. This Bushwick gallery has gotten back into its routine and it seems like the co-owners, Elle Burchill and Andrea Monti, are truly enjoying the change of pace.
After the Monday night screening of a film by Soviet-Armenian filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov, Elle Burchill told me that their Event Series has been doing really well. Being very prolific, Microscope hosts art film screenings and performances almost every Monday night. Monday events usually complement the current exhibition or are related to it in some way. Burchill says that recently they even had to send home some unlucky people when they couldn’t jam in anymore into the 23-f00t-long space for a recent event. There were already 45 people inside. It is notable (and commendable) that Microscope Gallery actually pays the performers and the filmmakers who are often present at the screenings. It is amazing to watch a white box gallery space turn into a black box screening room at night, and, if you’re lucky, you can watch films by artists who exhibit on the walls of the gallery.
Drawings by James Fotopoulos.
This complementary approach that marries drawing and video is very familiar to Chicago-based artist James Fotopoulos, whose drawings are currently being featured at the St. Charles Place gallery. Two hundred of the artist’s drawings cover the walls and they were all created while he was working on two of his recent films, Thick Comb, Chimera and Alice in Wonderland. As part of his process, Fotopoulos sketches every element of his films until he perfects them and they could stand on their own as works of art. They encapsulate his ideas and feel singular yet connected to one another. “ … So if a film collapsed, the concept existed,” Fotopulous explains.
Through his “film drawings,” Fotopoulos explores the tension between process and completion. “Is a sketch more alive as an idea than the completed work?“ he seems to ask.
Some of the “Red” drawings by Fotopulous.
The color that dominates most of the drawings at Microscope is red, so the works are simply referred to as Reds, while a parallel series, Blues, hangs on an adjacent wall. The artist works mainly in charcoal. His subject matter includes personal objects, parts of the body, personal symbols from his youth, memories and dreams. The drawings feel cinematic, maybe even hypnotic. His reds feel inviting, and despite many drawings being personal, I didn’t feel “excluded” or pushed away as a viewer, to the contrary, I felt very welcomed into his graphic world.
One of the walls of drawings.
While the drawings of Fotopoulos are warm and welcoming, his films are abstract and non-narrative. On January 23, Microscope will feature a night of the film and video by James Fotopoulos and Laura Parnes Sublimated Violence & Visual Excess, as part of their regular Monday events. It will surely offer another window into the artist’s world alive with color, images and untold stories.
A view of some of the artist’s “Blue” series.
Dreamful Slumbers, Works by James Fotopoulos is on view in Microscope Gallery (4 St. Charles Place, Bushwick, Brooklyn) through February 6.
January 27th, 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
more info www.microscopegallery.com
tel: 347.925.1433
J/M/Z – Myrtle/Broadway
L – Morgan Ave or Jefferson Street
B54 Willoughby/Myrtle stop is directly across the street
January 23rd, 2012
January 20th, 2012
Jan 7th to Feb 6th
MICROSCOPE Gallery
4 Charles Place
Brooklyn, 11221
Gallery Hours: Thurs-Mon 1-6PM, and by appointment
www.microscopegallery.com
Tel: 347.925.1433
email: info@microscopegallery.com
January 9th, 2012
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