Blackbirds
- Ken Paul Rosenthal |
- 1998 |
- 9 minutes |
- COLOR |
- OPT
Rental Format(s): 16mm film
Televised footage of the Rodney King/Reginald Denny beatings is repositioned as an extended series of re-photographed, hand-processed images that slowly dissolve from recognizable beings into anonymous figures. As each generation of images becomes increasingly textured, the film itself appears to abuse King/Denny, thus re-framing them as victims of the same moving picture medium that was meant to vindicate them.
The mutual and simultaneous disintegration of filmic and racial color is illustrated through a broad range of photo-chemical manipulations, including: negative and cross-process developing; solarization; and temperature and agitation-based effects on grain, color, and emulsion. Suburban and natural sound elements rise and fade with each generation of images.
Exhibition: Rotterdam International Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival, MI; Anthology Film Archives, NYC; Telluride International Experimental Cinema Exposition, CO; Image Movement Cinematheque, Taipei, China; Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo, NY; San Francisco Cinematheque; Singapore International Film Festival; Rio de Janeiro International Short Film Festival; Splice This Super 8 Film Festival, Toronto, Canada; Video Ex Festival, Zurich, Switzerland; The Lab, San Francisco, CA; Global 8 Day, Switzerland; Other Cinema, San Francisco, CA; Super Super 8 World Tour (USA, Europe, Japan).