Events
July 29 - Aug 9: GNY Cinema, Film Screening with Jim Finn
Saturday, August 7, 2010
3:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Alternate screenings daily, 3pm
Conversation with Finn following Saturday, Aug 7 screening
Interkosmos, 2006 (video, 71
mins)
La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo, 2007
(video, 60 mins)
The Juche Idea, 2008 (video, 62 mins)
Jim Finn’s feature trilogy functions both as a set of wry pastiches of imagined Communist projects and sincere ruminations on the loss of visionary utopianism, each presenting itself as an artifact from a different socialist moment. Interkosmos celebrates the exploits of an international team of cosmonauts through the form of a lo-fi East German documentary musical, while La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo poses as a propaganda video shot in a Peruvian women’s prison by its zealous population of Shining Path Maoists. Partially inspired by Kim Jong-il’s real-life kidnapping of a South Korean director for the improvement of his regime’s film industry, The Juche Idea uses Kim’s own aesthetic theories to tell the story of a South Korean bio-artist on a purported “residency” in North Korea, where she creates artworks in honor of the Dear Leader like The Tiny Dentures of Imperialism. By employing the outdated rhetorics of collective change for comedic effect, Finn nonetheless seriously engages with the historical failure of socialist revolutions as Marx himself would have seen it—first as tragedy, now as farce.
