Sixteen Candles

Sixteen Candles, 1998, video, color, sound, total running time 36 seconds

Sixteen Candles is a surgical substitution of one character for another in the 1984 John Hughes film Sixteen Candles. The character of Samantha Baker (played by Molly Ringwald) is replaced with “The Geek” (played by Anthony Michael Hall) in a fantasy sequence between Ringwald and the handsome boy of her dreams, Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling). What was once a stock romantic scene for a mid-80’s teen movie becomes slightly less stock as a result of the new dynamic, as well as explicitly sexual due to the addition of new overdubbed dialogue. This project is a collaboration with Tom Kehn.

Based on the True Story of Rocky Dennis

Based on the True Story of Rocky Dennis, 1999, video, color, sound, total running time 2 minutes and 9 seconds

Based on the True Story of Rocky Dennis extracts, rearranges, and loops scenes from the 1985 Peter Bogdanovich film Mask in order to highlight the acutely manipulative aspects of the film. What becomes evident after successive viewings of Mask and the second filmic ingredient, Deliverance, directed by John Boorman in 1972, is that tender stories and appalling stories are equally as brutal in exploiting audience emotions. Saccharine moments from Mask – an excessively heartfelt story about the struggles of a highly intelligent boy with serious disfiguring cranial enlargements to overcome prejudice – are juxtaposed with the most disturbing scene of depravity from Deliverance – the notoriously violent sodomy of Bobby (Ned Beatty).

Contrasting the endless scenes from Mask that illustrate the noblest aspects of humanity with Deliverance’s wanton violation might seem extremely crude and provoke hasty reactions of disapproval; nevertheless, this deliberate poisoning of the well effectively brings into sharp relief the manner in which audience emotions have been manipulated by maudlin characters and implausible actions from the very beginning. The film equation presented in Based on the True Story of Rocky Dennis might not be liked, but it demands acknowledgement as simply a different product of the same language utilized in the source films. This project is a collaboration with Tom Kehn.

The Pathos of Richard Dreyfus

The Pathos of Richard Dreyfus, 1998, video, color, sound, total running time 8 minutes and 50 seconds

The Pathos of Richard Dreyfus collects and strings together in chronological order every scene from Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind in which the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming appears. Regardless of the duration of the scene, if the Devil’s Tower appeared on screen in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it was included in The Pathos of Richard Dreyfus. From glimpses of the Devil’s Tower in pencil sketches, to zooms into maps, to tracking shots around mashed potato sculptures of the tower, to the actual tower itself – the obsessive collecting of imagery in The Pathos of Richard Dreyfus mirrors the fanatical qualities that mark the movie’s misunderstood protagonists.

The soundtrack for the piece is a repeated five second sample of a rising string buildup with an agitated Richard Dreyfus gutturally barking “not right, not right – not right,” while failing to give sculptural form to his mysterious vision of the yet unseen Devil’s Tower. The audio loops for the duration of the piece and briefly synchronizes when it reaches the video source from which it was extracted. This project is a collaboration with Tom Kehn.

The Pathos of Anthony Michael Hall

The Pathos of Anthony Michael Hall, 1998, video, color, sound, total running time 2 minutes and 56 seconds

The Pathos of Anthony Michael Hall is a 2 minute and 56 second investigation of a 5 second clip from the John Hughes film Sixteen Candles. The scene has been so savaged through live video scratching that the narrative flow of the original message has been entirely obliterated. All remaining signs point to the fact that the character of Jake (flannel shirt), despite being the object of many a straightforward romantic fantasy, is ultimately involved in a sadomasochistic relationship as evidenced by his brutal treatment of the young Anthony Michael Hall (trapped under table).

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