BIOGRAPHY

"Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art," The New York Times said Jim Finn's films "often play like unearthed artifacts from an alternate universe." His award-winning movies have been called "Utopian comedies" and "trompe l'oeil films". The trilogy of communist features is in the permanent collection of the MoMA, and he has had retrospectives in seven countries. His movies have screened widely at festivals like Sundance, Rotterdam, Sao Paulo, AFI and Edinburgh as well as museums and cinematheques. He has been making films, videos, revolutionary needlepoint pillows and photographs for over a decade. His first feature film Interkosmos was called "a retro gust of communist utopianism" by the Village Voice and "charming and fantastic, so full of rare atmospheres" by Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. His second feature La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo was put on the Village Voice's Top 10 Year in Experimental Film. And Variety called The Juche Idea, his film about a North Korean art residency, "brilliant" and said all three films "upturn notions of documentary and fiction, propaganda thought, reality and restaging, and even what an 'experimental film' actually is." He is featured in a 2010 Phaidon Press book called Take 100—The Future of Film: 100 New Directors. He was born in St. Louis and is currently teaching at Pratt Institute and living between New York and Boston.

GRANTS, AWARDS, DISTINCTIONS

Alpert/Macdowell Fellowship: residency at the Macdowell Colony, July 2012
J. Hoberman's Top 10 Films of 2010 (Village Voice), The Juche Idea 2008
Experimental Film, Rio de Janeiro Short Film Festival, Dick Cheney in a Cold, Dark Cell 2009
Distribution Grant for N.Y. Artists, free103point9 & N.Y. State Council on the Arts 2009
Montalvo Arts Center Residency, Saratoga, California, June-July 2009
Best Narrative Feature, Chicago Underground Film Festival, The Juche Idea 2008
Closing Night Film, New York Underground Film Festival, The Juche Idea 2008
Honorable Mention, Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Juche Idea 2008
Hallwalls Artist-in-Residence Project (funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation) 2007-8
Finishing Funds Award, Experimental Television Center 2008
Top Ten Year in Experimental Film, Village Voice, La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo 2007
Closing Night Film, Chicago Underground Film Festival, La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo 2007
Special Assistance Grant, Illinois Arts Council, 2003, 2005, 2006
Opening Night Film, New York Underground Film Festival, Interkosmos 2006
Black Maria Director’s and Program Staff’s Citation, Decision 80, 2004
Chicago Underground Film Fund Award, La Lotería 2004
Blue Award, Thaw Film/Video Festival, wüstenspringmaus 2003
Made-in-Chicago Award, Chicago Underground Film Festival, super-max 2003
Community Arts Assistance Grant, City of Chicago 1998, 2001-2003, 2005

THE UTOPIAN COMEDY

It has been cried and celebrated in equal part, but both sides agreed: 1989 marked the end of collective utopias; a death foretold and desired by expansive capitalism, thus pulling down the last walls which were still erected to destabilize liberal democracies. Communism was barely breathing; the new air of revolution had been transformed into a gasp. Are there still any traces of those revolutions? Would it be possible to reconstruct the intensity of the utopia? Those are the questions that Jim Finn asks to himself in every one of his films, almost as an identical starting point, but which can derive in the most unexpected and hilarious answers. Interested in the forms of revolutionary art, in the looks and actions communisms encouraged, Finn searches for fundamental knots where this ideology was brought together in an extreme, ambitious project: East Germany's race for space conquest in Interkosmos, the Maoist community reeducation in La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo, North Korea's practice of film as ideological propaganda in The Juche Idea.

The peculiar thing about these three films is that they belong to the same subgenera, the mockumentary. Or to say it in all its contradiction: Finn is a specialist in mockumentaries about the real utopia. Like a Marxist Christopher Guest (in both senses of the term: a little bit Groucho, a little bit Karl), Finn moves in the field of humor that opens out stealthy, irregular, unsuspected, generally sharp and bringing down structures. Never deriving on realistic parodies, for these mockumentaries, the utopia and the absurd confabulate at times to create a space even more ahead of its time, even more avant garde. That's why perhaps science fiction is so present in his cinema; also maybe because of that, audiovisual experimentation with forms and formats is essential to the plot of the movies. But this introduction to Finn's world would be incomplete if a fundamental characteristic in his work isn't contemplated. Many of his shorts are something resembling strange music videos of pop communism, and his films always include musical choreographies with a sense of epiphany. It's just that Finn is not interested in any revolution in which dancing is not allowed. And that is a libertarian utopian worth fighting for.

Diego Trerotola, Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI)

CV & ACADEMIC

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CONTACT

Jim Finn: finn.jim@gmail.com   

Contact: finn.jim@gmail.com | Design by Arthur Jones with a grant from free103point9 and the New York State Council on the Arts