kris & georges talk
2011
I wanted more layers or folds than were present in Textual Porn and to increase the affect / confusion / frustration in the audience. The film is loosely based on a televised interview Georges Bataille gave in 1958 to talk about his book, Literature and Evil. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WiwNekNJGA
I have taken sentences from Literature and Evil, translated them back into French and filmed myself speaking these lines against a green screen. I then took lines from Kris Kristofferson songs, (whatever you may think of him, he writes memorable lyrics), again, translated them into French and filmed myself from behind against a green screen speaking the lines. When these two elements were brought together in the film, I am having a conversation with myself.
Bataille’s and Kristofferson’s lines are then written on the screen (blue for Bataille red for Kristofferson) as they are spoken, as though they were subtitles.
I am narrating text I have written, drawing on Nietzsche, Deleuze, Maccormack, O’Sullivan, Foucault and Agamben. It is performative and prescriptive and is not meant to be entirely comprehensive, but short phrases / soundbites should be picked up.
There is a soundtrack, using chords from Me and Bobby McGee (a Kristofferson song) which have been cut and re-distributed.
It is absurd, incomprehensible and very pretentious. It is self-parody.
“...the business of art history changes from a hermeneutic to a heuristic activity: art history as a kind of parallel to the work that art is already doing rather than as an attempt to fix and interpret art; indeed, art history as precisely a kind of creative writing.” (Simon O’Sullivan 2001. The Aesthetics of Affect. Angeliki, Vol 4, Number 3, pp.125-135)