Montage Through a Viewfinder, Short Essay Film
The celebrity strives for commodification. All details of their lives are in sharp focus and in the public eye. The concept of the film is inspired by Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema: the Logistics of Perception and how the evolution of the photographic image is intertwined with the history of combat.
Today, spectators imbibe quotidian violence through a constant stream of media. I cut together a channel-switching loop mimicking pre-digital basic cable. Each channel switch is broken up by static. An image resembling the viewfinder of a machine gun is layered over the clips, showing a limited selection of the television frame which references Etienne-Jules Marey’s photographic rifle.
The programs I sampled include Friends, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Big Bang Theory, Top Gun, The Real Housewives of New York, Full House The Fabulous life of the Filthy Rich, and a station on a commercial break. The reality television shows depict a desire for American opulence while the sitcoms are an example of the banal, cookie-cutter sets and laugh-track. What all these clips have in common is a white-washed image of anxiety and trauma that the modern day spectator is exposed to in mainstream media entertainment. The celebrity reaps the reward of their own exploitation.
My Neighbor is My Enemy, Essay Film Collaboration
Adapted from the ‘Montage Through a Viewfinder’ original concept, in collaboration with Juan Solomon and Eva Lucià Sotomeyor.
The film 'My Neighbor is My Enemy' has five chapters. It includes clips from newsreel footage/photographs, the Netflix show House of Cards, and five songs that are most common in each of our cultures. Disidentification is a continuous theme in the film. It is a reaction to the inner conflict that I (and my collaborators in their segments) experience.
I edited the middle three segments of the film including historical footage from Puerto Rico dealing with colonization, The Mexican border and surveillance and The Palestine-Israel dividing wall. We attempted to detourn the footage and build on my previous project, based on Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema, by placing a gun viewfinder inside of a heart. The heart can represent our personal perspective, the conflicted love for our cultures, the American media portraying hate under the guise of love and also an emoji/pop-culture symbol that is commonly over-used.
The soundtrack detourns the footage further. Each song is cliché in the corresponding culture. They are celebration songs. Supremacy celebrates while people are caught in violence, desensitized.
This film is not meant to be offensive, make light of any situation or throw blanket criticism over any particular group of people. Our goal is to convey an affect showing how we, the artists respond to issues that are important to us and a part of us.