17.11.11

The Puppeteer & More - Screening & Party

The Puppeteer & More

Screening + Party

Friday, November 18, 2011
9pm

Nublu
62 Avenue C, New York, NY 10009

Admission under invitation only.
Please contact +1 (347) 962-2918

+

Live set: Roberto Paci Dalo (www.giardini.sm)
DJ set: SMOKERZ + guest

Italian artist Roberto Paci Dalò belong to the innovative exponents of
the european contemporary art scene, with projects created in music,
performing arts, visual arts, and films.

Screening of the shorts: Pavel Alter's The Puppeteer (premiere),
Roberto Paci Dalò's Petroleo México, and Brian Deutzman's Hype.

The Puppeteer
New York, city of dreams… for Pavel Alter, instead, it is a grim
premise for the union of Odessa and Jeremy: two instantly magnetized
puppeteers, who interact in an alternately beautiful noir and dire
photocopy portrait of the city. His The Puppeteer, starring Sussie
Rojgaard and Danny Bouchebel, is set in an alienated Manhattan, and
explores the encounter of Odessa and Jeremy, whose drifting, seemingly
mechanically contrived fates produce a series of entwining,
disorienting vignettes. As Alter remarks, "there is no love in it."
An interpretation of the contemporary metropolis, the film follows
Odessa and Jeremy through a labyrinth of disjointed, black-and-white
scenes: a nondescript diner, the perilous shaft of an apartment flat,
a gruesome fish market, a vertiginous Laundromat. Stilted and
reverberating in their chopped-up scenarios, the puppeteers' dialogues
are brought to vivid and ultra-saturated focus, like the fated
masquerade in which Odessa and Jeremy partake: a quest for blind,
consumerist beauty.

As Alter comments, “we feel as if someone is going to be manipulated.”
Naïve and ultra-feminine as Odessa seems, we may wonder she will be
the one. But, throughout the film, her sexual identity only lingers
un-clarified, like the rest of the characters’ disjointed orchestrated
movements: a possible extension of her relationship with Jeremy.

Including themes of hallucination, reality, imprisonment and despair,
The Puppeteer is underpinned by the soundtrack of the composer Roberto
Paci Dalò, deft in his arrangement of sparse avant jazz, lush piano,
strings, vocals and ambient noise fragments, to orchestrate the film's
ever-contrasting and shifting moodscapes. As the voice of Jeremy
repeats, "this is just a show," we await, wide-eyed, the fate of
Odessa, as she barrels closer to her big-city debut.

About Pavel Alter: Alter received a degree in philosophy at the
Sorbonne in Paris, France (1994) before studying film at the New York
Film Academy (2000 – 2001), where he completed a number of short
films, including The Mermaid (2000). In addition to a script for a
feature film, Alter is currently working on creating an artist
residence at his home in Big Fresh Pond, Southampton, and a
"metro-production" to promote the work of other film and video
artists.