Slow kaleidoscope gif1/22/2024 ![]() ![]() On the contrary, each work garners its specific filmic language from its self-referential quality. Every statement in the screenplay sounds incredibly significant, yet remote-to the point that the film itself appears to slowly turn into the simulacra of a film, pure melancholia instilled by light.Įach of Fahrenholz’s films depicts a community of people and never forces the permeability of its boundaries. Hence Acker’s play serves as a device for depicting a real community of people-namely the urban hipsters, the inheritors of punk disenchantment that are incapable of parroting subcultural angst, as well as of jeopardizing the dialectic between what is gone and what is left, chained to the instability of the present. ![]() Implosion stages life as a proof of concept, in which language implies neither nature nor culture, and emphasizes the characters’ formal reality: a life spent in gyms, in clubs and on iPhones while working as graphic designers or Internet porn actors, between occupations and in flux. The characters’ movements unfurl along with their speaking, not eliciting nostalgic sentiments towards terms like “revolution,” but instead animating the picture of a shared void. This drama about the French Revolution, set among the punks, drug addicts and sex workers of downtown New York City in the 1980s unfolds here against a backdrop of the glass curtain walls of a high-rise condominium, propped up by laptops and bouquets of flowers. In the case of Implosion, a play by Kathy Acker offers the four young men a weighty narrative in order to cope with the abstract nature of their bodies. Infrequently, a screenplay governs the events. The domain of Fahrenholz’s films could in fact be framed within a social body, which from time to time is molded by the act of filming. Here as well, it seems that Fahrenholz’s interest lays in their tokenistic qualities, or rather in their capacity to narrow a sociocultural scenario, along with its interrelated symbolic systems. The bodies are white and bluish, and explicitly the bodies of gay men, and of victims-they are “living currency,” as Pierre Klossowski would have put it, fetishes for deviant thoughts rather than pure, instinctual desire. In Implosion the bodies of the four young men featured in the film are almost impalpable: their muscles stay under their skin like water in a flask. The film indeed never drops out of the realm of the two-dimensional: it stays in the pure virtuality of the representation of fantasy imagery. Their virtuosity lingers in the ability to render a deliberately severe geometry of the space in which they dance, each movement suggesting a graphic image, and thus freezing the time of the action-video games, along with animation movies, are among the dancers’ primary visual references. Among them, members of the Ringmasters crew perform liquid choreographies of muscular moves. In Ditch Plains (2013) most of the bodies are corpses: they seem rather weighty, but warm, as if they are just trapped into a slow-wave sleep. Seemingly, the characters’ bodies are the point in question in Fahrenholz’s films. And no matter their beauty, their naïvité, what surfaces is a tragicomic life, hailed by the phoenix of a démodé nihilism, a cultural stance fueled by a sort of metropolitan white-trash imaginary, which represses even the most hyperbolic formulation of any political statement on the present. Towards these characters one could feel, if not compassion, at least empathy. And how can one not lose oneself in tender feelings in front of the young men thrown into revolutionary narratives in Implosion (2011) or the budding artists caught up in the destitution of their intimate, everyday life in Haust (2010) or even the chameleonic Emily Sundblad as portrayed in Que Bárbara (2012), performing her music, shopping for wine in the company of her mother, hanging out with friends. ![]() Behind muteness, the true cynic sees tenderness. Loretta Fahrenholz’s films confront a cynical understanding of a prevailing reality with an ingrained affection for human life-an ethos one might call “emo-core.” The prosaic muteness of some of the characters in her films could be said, in fact, to stem from certain “arty” attitudes that mimick a Brechtian non-identificatory exploitation of language-not to mention the equally “arty” hipsterism, or rather a slant that renders hipsters, often urban youths, incapable of effectively inhabiting any prescribed role within society.
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