Westerns

Western Sunburn is a re-photography in video of material that was originally used in a performance during which Karl Lemieux painted, scratched and burned 16mm film loops from an old western. Traces of an impossible past and future collide in a trajectory where the present unravels. Soundtrack by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem in My Heart, Land of Kush).

Peter Tscherkassky concentrates on central motifs from Sergio Leone’s classic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, zeroing in on Eli Wallach stumbling across a vast cemetery and the anti-hero’s head as he dangles from the gallows. Tscherkassky intercuts the latter image with countdown leader, ironically delaying the saving bullet shot by Clint Eastwood. Hereby the very film tears and suddenly descends into pure, soundless whiteness. (Stefan Grissemann)

Removing keyframes from a digital version of John Ford’s The Searchers, Baron and Goodwin attack the film’s temporal structuring to render a kinetic ​“painted desert” of the West. The dust kicked up by the movement in the film is pure pixel, unanchored from the photographic realism that used to constrain it.

Located somewhere between the writings of Robert Smithson and the westerns of Howard Hawks – that ​“somewhere” being the present, momentarily suspended in a few video fragments of the landscape. A here and an elsewhere, a site (sight) and its nonsite (nonsight). Another movie adrift in the atmosphere. Pieces of information on the assembly and disassembly of Howard Hawk’s Red River (1948) played and fast-forwarded against a background of fall leaves. Cattle, cowboys, and everything else that once made up the cinematic imaginary.

Maurice Lemaître pays tribute to Thomas Ince and William S. Hart, ancestors and creators of the cowboys film. The Song of Rio Jim features a Western story, albeit one that doesn’t unfold visually – the film remains black from beginning to end – but instead resides fully in the sound. The spectator will thus be able to imagine all possible westerns and anti-westerns.

Lord knows where João de Deus, the filmmaker’s usual alter ego, has been. He’s come home with a bit of the soundtrack of Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954) in his head. In this insomniac, delirious hour, dawn slowly breaks over the city.