Event

Utopia

Aug 13

(James Benning, United States, 1998, 16mm, 93 min)

Wednesday, Aug 13 at 08:00PM

The opening credits for Utopia read: "Except for some additional ambience, the entire sound track of this film has been taken (without permission) from: Ernesto Che Guevara, the Bolivian Journal. A film by Richard Dindo. The images were found in the desert landscape from Death Valley south to, and crossing, the Mexican border."

The text at the end of the film concludes: "A sidewinder moving across the desert sand leaves in its wake an angled trail of parallel J's. A Kangaroo rat ingesting seeds produces water by extracting hydrogen and oxygen from their carbohydrates and recombines the gases into H20. Ridges in its nostrils trap the moisture it exhales. Waiting in stillness, the snake swallows the rat whole and immediately begins to absorb the water from its tissue. Hours later a circling roadrunner grabs the sidewinder behind the head and shakes it violently breaking the snake's back. The next day with several inches of snake tail still protruding from its mouth, the roadrunner continues to slowly dissolve the other end, absorbing the water from the sidewinder - and the Kangaroo rat."