I recently attended a fairly high profile art video festival,
which shall be nameless, and I came away feeling depressed.
There was some good work (indeed, some magnificent, not much, but some) but
on the whole it was just a dispiriting display of meretricious effects, sloppy thinking
and a striving for the quick impression; all pretty souless & forgettable stuff.
(Oh, and plus a lot of cliched tosh about the – yawn – “post-human”. Wasn’t post human,
most of it, so much as post-being-any-good)
Then, on the other hand, you come across something like this:
no in-your-faceness, modest, austere and subtle, makes you do a little bit of work,
but so, so worth spending time with.
is the Brazilian video maker who made this small and perfect gem
– an account of the celebration of the Day of the Dead by expat Mexicans
living in London.
You can see the whole thing here (and I urge you to do so).
Betty Martins cheered me up considerably and I look forward to much more
work of this quality from her.