Maya Ben David
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This is my favourite piece of video art
🕑 Added 2022-03-23 00:46:02 +0000 UTC***Warning! There is imagery of something sharp poking into skin and mild body horror in this film****
I have watched this piece so many times, it makes me cry or feel very strongly every time I do. I would give it a shot and be patient for the story to reveal itself. It's about a fictional witch scientist who makes "cures" out of found chemicals. It's difficult to tell from the framing whether her concoctions work or not because the narrator could be an unreliable. It's easy to watch this video and read it in context of modern science misinformation but remember it was released 22 years ago and mentions the AIDS epidemic. It also sounds like this is in an alternative timeline because the narrator mentions there aren't any plants to harvest anymore for medicine. There's an alluring nostalgia in this piece that really transports you, the sounds of radio, imagery of pencils drawing on maps, the discussion of "treasure hunting". Something that speaks to me is the investigation of the grotesque and contaminated. I like making characters that play with those themes as well, fibreglass insulation, popcorn ceilings etc. One day I want to make a character that is as compelling and mysterious as the radio science witch. There's a great emphasis in this film about a collective feeling of "unwellness" that I find very relatable but also soothing. It feels both cathartic and tragic to see a fictional community band together to collect and share this woman's toxic recipe's.
Here is an excerpt from a little essay I found about the piece: "Matheson, conjures a state where even the pretense of paternalistic intent has been abandoned long ago, its citizens left to forage for what once was freely available. The spectre of disease is treated as a given, and yet this is more than just a paranoid fantasy. One can't help but see real-life parallels with the pharmaceutical industry's resistance to generic drugs and low-cost AIDS treatment, or the biopiracy battles now being fought in the Amazon Basin. The effectiveness of these basement concoctions, then, is ultimately beside the point. When viewed through our present-day safety net left torn and tattered, Matheson leaves us with an image whose outlandishness is surpassed only by its sorry familiarity."
Read the full essay here: http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ45/Supanickpage.html
Anyways, I would really like to hear your thoughts on this work, it means a lot to me and i'm just in the mood to share it.
-toxic radium covered rat
Comments
Maya Ben David
omg you are one of the only people who actually clicked on this video I shared! It does feel like the narrator is under the shamanesses' spell, a true believer. Or maybe he's archiving the phenomenon and really interested in the story. I really like the ending where you find out that she's eroded part of her face and "feels great!". It feels almost legendary
PicoDeGallo
I clicked on this, saw it was thirty minutes, said to myself, "Eh, I'll give it a minute and maybe watch the rest another time if it seems good," then ended up watching the whole thing. It surprised me to see that it was made in 2000, which makes it about ten times more impressive. I've only watched it the one time, so I may have missed this, but did the narrator have a motive for following this radio "witch/alchemist?" I think that would go a long ways in determining his reliability. Like, if he's hoping to catch a recipe to a cure for something that he has or for someone that he cares about, then he's going to have a certain amount of desperation which would likely blind him to anything that might cause him to lose hope. But it's so mysterious if he doesn't really have a motivation like that. Like, this dude's gonna uproot his entire life, no forwarding address, to follow this shamaness into the wild unknown. It would be like he's under a spell, or he's developed an extremely unhealthy obsession.
