*Screening on Thursdays & Saturdays, 59 mins
Remembrance of Things Fast: True Stories Visual Lies, 1994 by John Maybury (b. 1958, London) is a landmark work, in terms of its use of high-end post-production techniques and visual f/x to construct an imaginary, complex and thoroughly queer virtual landscape — one which extravagantly references the tropes and visual language of broadcast television, underground film, gay porn, drag & club culture, activist détournement, and music videos, while fluidly slipping between the boundaries separating those mediums. Although Maybury’s presence seems objective and absent from the video (he seems content only to observe these shadier corners of ‘the Matrix’), the numerous other characters portrayed are native inhabitants of this nonlinear, ever-shifting media landscape — their bodies multiplying, their appearance shifting and morphing, their presence defiant and celebratory, even as the terrain threatens to dissolve or obliterate them. It is a reminder of the (sometimes contradictory) balancing act that must occur between the desire for mainstream representation, equality and visibility … and the kind of liberated personal identity that can only be invented and explored in the shadows and the imagination. – Sean Capone
Remembrance of Things Fast is presented alongside (on alternating days) Avatar Poetics.
