Tag: archive

In Berkeley’s Island

Moby Dick

Stealing Beauty

Wild Boy

Guy Ben-Ner was born in Ramat Gam, Israel. He currently lives in New York.

 Stealing Beauty (2007) was shot without permission at numerous IKEA stores around New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv. In the movie the Ben-Ners quite naturally inhabit idealized showroom interiors with price tags dangling from furniture, and shoppers occasionally interrupting the family’s daily routines. Because of the hit-and-run filming, the traditional cinematic continuity is abandoned and the changing sets are stand-ins for their home. The narrative, however, remains linear as the father offers life lessons on the subjects of economic exchange, meaning of private property, ethics, and family love eventually leading to the children’s rebellious manifesto.

In Berkeley’s Island (1999) the first video to address his position of “domestic artist”, Guy Ben-Ner placed a small sandy island complete with a palm tree in the middle of the kitchen and became a shipwreck survivor living in solitude amidst domestic life going on around him. Through existential introspection combined with often hilarious use of resources that the kitchen set provides (“I learned to use what the island supplied me with”), “Berkeley’s Island” depicts the home environment as an exile and simultaneously as a place to escape from.

 Moby Dick (2000) adapts Herman Melville’s classic novel, a sprawling tale centered on Captain Ahab’s quest to exact revenge against the great white whale Moby-Dick. The video features Guy and his 6-year-old daughter play-acting in their home kitchen in ways that take to absurd extremes the aesthetic of family home videos. Using minimal props (a rope and a pole) Ben-Ner transforms the space into a make-believe ship – a playground for the reenactment of the classic tale.
 
Wild Boy (2004) tells the story of a wild child and his educator, a story of power relations and the fantasy of bringing somebody up after one’s own image. It is the story of every parent-child rearing, but more than that, it is a story of a director and his child-actor, raising the question of what it means to direct a child, to contain a child inside a fixed frame, to command him in and out of the frame (as if it is his private room).
On another level, it also raises the possibility of looking at early cinema (the “Cinema of attractions” as was coined by Tom Gunning), as a mute wild child that was tamed, eventually, by language (sound, narrative). “Wild boy” is based on several case histories, some myths, some educational manuals and is referring to a wide range of movies, from old photos left of the vaudeville acts by father and son, Buster and Joe Keaton, through Truffaut’s “Wild Child”, to “The Kid” by Chaplin.

Thanks to Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea for lending us Guy’s work www.postmastersart.com

Black Gold traces the tangled trail from the two billion cups of coffee consumed each day back to the coffee farmers who produce the beans. It follows Tadesse Meskela—General Manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union—as he tries to get a living wage for the 70,000 Ethiopian coffee farmers he represents. After oil, coffee is the most actively traded commodity in the world with

$80 billion dollars in retail sales. But farmers make as little as three cents for every cup of coffee sold in the U.S. or Europe. Most of the rest of the money goes to the four giant food conglomerates which control the coffee market.

In Ethiopia, 15,000,000 people are dependent on the coffee industry; 67% of its foreign trade is in coffee. Between 2001 and 2003, when the price for coffee hit a 30 year low, farmers could no longer feed themselves, famine spread and feeding stations had to be established throughout the coffee region.

Black Gold explains how international commodities markets are rigged against the nations of the global South. Developed countries like the U.S. subsidize agricultural products, flooding the market with low-priced goods, while demanding that poor countries remove tariff barriers and open their markets. 2006, 77min.

Owen Ashworth, formerly a resident of San Francisco, now of Chicago, has been playing music as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone over a decade, releasing albums on Tomlab and contributing to the soundtrack for Jon Moritsugu’s “Scum Rock”. He recently appeared on the David Shrigley compilation “Worried Noodles” and has a 7″ for this tour of songs from a film by artist Laurel Nakadate entitled “STAY THE SAME NEVER CHANGE.”

David Enos
“One of San Francisco’s best underground talents, Enos has used videotape to craft a number of hand-drawn and hand-spliced animated shorts. Music biography is one recurrent subject: Enos’s trademark deadpan charm adds magic to illustrated and condensed life stories of Jim Morrison (complete with writhing snakes), Dennis Wilson (with a cameo by Charlie Manson), and Leonard Cohen.” -Johnny Ray Huston, SF Bay Guardian

Plus:

Foot Foot is a Los Angeles-based group of gentle indie pop experts of the folksy variety.