Change Your Image
ucuervo
Reviews
Nobody Dies When It's Sunny (2007)
An astute depiction of American grime
I saw this film at a festival in the Netherlands recently. It's an agile and impertinent film, abominable and atrocious in it's cruddy shrewdness and dashing hideousness. The film is a harrowing journey into the seductively wretched underpinnings of American crud, a society besmirched in the allurement of social squalor. I especially loved the lighting and camera work. Too often nowadays people do the "hand-held reality shot" just because they're too lazy to use a tripod, but they muck it up because they don't know what the honk they're doing. But here the filmmaker really knows how to use a camera, and it seems like the camera is like a part of his body, giving us the viewer a sort of "out-of-our-body into-his- body" experience. And the lighting is simultaneously real and self-consciously noir. American film noir was, after all, not just an empty aesthetic but a reflection of the dark undercurrents in 1940's and 50's America. This film is pure contemporary American noir. Fascinating, disturbing, enchanting.
Piles of Dirt (2007)
An incredible film
Usually movies about art theory are boring enough to induce a coma in the first 30-seconds. Not "Piles of Dirt"! I was riveted to the screen for the duration of this penetrating, agitative art/theory thriller that builds up to a crescendo that will leave you breathless.
The famous artists and critics who try to decipher and unravel Scaff's enigmatic dirt and manure piles that he leaves strewn in cryptic lines across the city squares of the world duel like master sword fighters over the meaning and significance of the work. To the famous Dutch landscape artist Jeroen van Westen, Scaff is an "eco-terrorist." To the esteemed art historian Rik Fernhout, he is working very much within the tradition of Dutch landscape painting. To the economist Ram Satrasala he is using the manure of the sacred cow to reintroduce spirituality to contemporary society. To the culinary artist Debra Solomon he is "hacking" the public space. To the famous French philosopher Gerard Defflothe he is making metaphorical references to rare mushrooms and cheese. To the preeminent anthropologist Nick Enfield it is all a sports metaphor. Meanwhile Scaff deftly ambles through this intellectual minefield depositing his piles of dirt like a pied piper of compost.
Hats off to the artist who pulled off this remarkable film.