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Event
Dore O - Program Five
Perhaps O.'s most expansive production yet, CANDIDA is an adaptation of Frans Masereel's 1920 woodcut-novel "The Idea". The story concerns the form of a woman (Jara Bernardes) whether she's concocted from scratch like Maria in Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS, or merely raised in darkness, remains open to interpretation thrown from her prison-like domicile, only to make a crazed sprint for the city. O. introduces her eponymous heroine first as an object of patriarchal lust: naked in a glass reflection, painted over literally! one brush-stroke at a time by her scraggly-haired creator. Next we see him facing a wall, which the film transforms into a window with its next cut: a handheld perspective out a high-up apartment building. The frame tilts sideways, upside-down, pans down to the street and back up to the brick structure, as if weighing the camera's own sense of gravity against its dizzying surroundings. O. cuts back to the wall/window, but this time with a superimposition of Candida hanging over the "edge" again, these filmic devices leave much to the viewer's imagination arms flailing in slow motion.
Exterior, again: the image de-escalates from one floor to the next in a soothing drop, and cuts back to the now-completed superimposition: overladen with the sound of a cartoonish slide whistle, Candida flails her limbs, the camera pirouetting around her, and we realize we're watching Bernardes wriggle, prostrate, on a floor someplace. Bound by rising and falling synthesizer leitmotifs, her story is told almost entirely in these kinds of stripped-down, exploded modernist tableaux. Swallowed and spit out by the cityscape (embodied in both swarms of rapacious dudes, and transient location footage from Hamburg/Paris/Bahia/Vienna/NYC), Candida finds solace ultimately in the multiplication of her own image not merely persisting, but ultimately dominating. As ever, O.'s forever loosening and tightening multiple exposures carry their attendant compositions far beyond simple equations of montage.
More description-defying still is XOANAN, O.'s portrait of the painter Afrane Adje Twumm. Fabric finds another onscreen metaphor for the plastic arts, wherein bodies and walls are draped in cloth, doubling back on the hazy double-projected daydreams of ALASKA. O. trains her camera on a body of water as it passes the promenade, capturing idling youths and passing families as specks of silhouette crossing the film's unnamed territory, bound only by rocks at the screen's bottom and the sky above. EYE-STEP the latest work in the program traces a series of forever-winding staircases like liminal excerpts from an endless memory-spool, asking the viewer which spaces their eyes may have taken for granted along the ambling path. Scored to a lilting, plaintive accordion tango with no apparent beginning, middle or end, the frame tiptoes from suicidally vertiginous to borderline-sacrosanct in the space of a few beats, before circling back to retrace its steps yet again.
Read more: http://www.spectacletheater.com/dore-o/
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LocationSPECTACLE THEATER (View)
124 S. 3RD ST
BROOKLYN, NY 11211
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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