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Thursday, January 2, 2020
Leigh Ledare at Office Baroque
(link)
Leigh's is titillating surely, anxious, naughty, filled with all the nervous transgression of an arthouse "social experiment". Haha what if we took an anxious group psychology project but added a documentary panopticon. Of course the projects are interesting as they are well polished mirrors, psychology is turned into a formal exercise of cinema. And this thing is made for essay explicating all the formal structures that mirror its conflict. Watch "psychology" made into object of art, humans into a petri-dish, cross-sections of a people for microscope slides. "Arguably more anthropological than therapeutic..." The problematization method,* a sort of making-confounded. Greying the waters with the tangling of culture: people made demographics made signifiers, and forced to abut and spark. People are made to be art's object which gets conflated with analysand. Good cinema is not necessarily healthy outcome.
*Think Renzo Marten's Enjoy Poverty, Jordan Wolfson's Animation Masks, Korine's Spring Breakers.
(Watch the film through Ledare's website here.)