Reenactment
ART1341 — Screening
01 / 05
Shooting Geronimo
Kent Monkman · 2007 · 11 min · Canadian/Cree
Famed romantic filmmaker Frederick Curtis is shooting a film about Geronimo just outside the Long Horn Saloon. Frustrated with the unconvincing performances of his lead actor, he pulls another young sexy Cree man into the role. Jealousy ensues as Curtis alternately gushes over the two Cree boys as he manipulates them into broad Hollywood caricatures. A “Lonesome Rider” intercedes, teasing the action to a tragic twist, which forces the boys to take control of Curtis’s film.
02 / 05
Semiotics of the Kitchen
Martha Rosler · 1975 · 6 min
Semiotics of the Kitchen adopts the form of a parodic cooking demonstration in which, Rosler states, “An anti-Julia Child replaces the domesticated ‘meaning’ of tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration.” A static camera is focused on a woman in a kitchen who picks up each utensil, names it, and demonstrates it — with gestures that depart entirely from the tool’s normal use. In an ironic grammatology of sound and gesture, the woman and her implements enter and transgress the familiar system of everyday kitchen meanings, erupting into anger and violence. “When the woman speaks, she names her own oppression.”
03 / 05
The Eternal Frame
Ant Farm & T.R. Uthco · 1975 · 23 min · Doug Hall, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Jody Procter
The Eternal Frame is an examination of the role that the media plays in the creation of (post)modern historical myths. For T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm, the iconic event that signified the ultimate collusion of historical spectacle and media image was the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. Using the Zapruder footage as their starting point, they construct a multilayered event that is simultaneously a live performance spectacle, a taped re-enactment of the assassination, a mock documentary, and a simulation of the Zapruder film itself — performed in Dealey Plaza, the actual site of the assassination, eliciting bizarre responses from spectators who react to the simulation as though it were the original event.
04 / 05
The Third Memory
Pierre Huyghe · 1999 · Double projection
Real-life Dog Day Afternoon bank robber John Wojtowicz re-enacts the crime which made him famous. Fact, fiction, and memory collide and merge as re-enactment scenes, scenes from the Hollywood film, and television news footage of the original robbery are interwoven. Huyghe’s work probes the instability of memory when a life has already been processed through media representation — the re-enactment is a third version of events, after the robbery itself and the film it inspired.
05 / 05
Three Thousand
Asinnajaq · 2017 · 14 min · Inuk artist
Inuk artist Asinnajaq plunges us into a sublime imaginary universe — 14 minutes of luminescent, archive-inspired cinema that recasts the present, past and future of her people in a radiant new light. Diving into the NFB’s vast archive, she parses the complicated cinematic representation of the Inuit, harvesting fleeting truths and fortuitous accidents from a range of sources — newsreels, propaganda, ethnographic documentaries, and work by Indigenous filmmakers. Embedding historic footage into original animation, she conjures a vision of hope and beautiful possibility.