Dislocation Blues
Dislocation Blues takes as a point of departure the political manifestations of “stand with Standing Rock”, a relatively recent movement, opposed to the construction of a pipeline running through an Indian reservation. Hopinka contrasts the beauty of the Dakota landscape with testimonies of different people which are part of those camps, people who reflect in a very personal way about the concepts of identity and community.
If it’s indeed true that Hopinka does a correct work portraying current concerns through personal testimonies inside the environmentalist movement, this short film leaves a sensation of something seen already several times. Sadly, Dislocation Blues doesn’t find the way to differentiate itself from other very similar works that are produced every year in school films and documentary workshops.
Onward Lossless Follows
In the opposite pole of originality, we find the latest appropriation work by Michael Robinson. Onward Lossless Follows proposes, through the re-montage of images of different sources, and the dubbing of their original dialogues, a completely new narrative. Under the influence of that genius named Craig Baldwin (and, if we go even further in the past, of Joseph Cornell), Robinson re-edits and re-signifies images from the already known “scare films”: films made to be projected in schools and warn students about the dangers of abortion, drugs, sexual transmitted diseases, Satanism, communism, among other common “enemies” of the American dream.
In this short film, Robinson alters the meaning of a film that prevents children and adolescents against the dangers of getting inside a stranger’s car. Through changes in editing, and dubbing the original dialogues, the new narrative tells the forbidden love of a school boy and an older woman, who “flirt”, interpreting their roles in such “scare films”: the boy plays the innocent victim and the woman plays the part of the kidnapper. In this meta-fictional universe of Robinson, the characters are aware of the roles that play in the original images. Crossing the thin line between the comical and the sinister, the author looks to reveal to us the inherent darkness even in the most banal images and the most quotidian encounters.
Dislocation Blues
Director: Sky Hopinka
USA, 17 min
Onward Lossless Follows
Director: Michael Robinson
USA, 17 min