Hi-res press kit VARIETY (La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo): Though clearly based on Peru's Shining Path guerrilla movement, which was active in the countryside throughout the '80s and into the '90s, Finn's pic replaces the term "path" with "trench," suggesting an even more militant, kickass class of rebels. Finn's camera supposedly visits Canto Grande prison in 1989 Peru to record the day-to-day activities, statements, meetings and manifestos of the Shining Trench women, and finds them to be thoroughly swept up in a fever for armed struggle, even though they have no hope of prison release.Viewers arriving late will wonder what they've stumbled into, for Finn's simulation of an actual Maoist cadre is utterly convincing. The group hashes out methods of battle and medical care in the line of fire, ideological points of debate and theories of working-class dictatorship, and unabashedly embraces a particularly vicious version of Mao's Cultural Revolution-era "scorched earth" policies, in which any vestige of bourgeois life is to be eradicated. The massive chunks of discussion are taken directly from actual texts by Mao and Shining Path prisoners, delivered by Finn's ensemble with an off-the-cuff immediacy that's downright startling. Displacing the mood of permanent war are more relaxed episodes, in which the women knit, paint, make music and even perform "Macbeth" in, of all languages, the Dine tongue of the Navajo tribe. Long before the end of this too-brief featurette (just long enough to stand on its own, but also short enough to be comfortably billed with "Interkosmos"), dazzled auds will get a strong, heady whiff of what life ruled by Maoist fanatics would feel and sound like, and the bloody-minded absurdity underlying it all. [Robert Koehler] VILLAGE VOICE (La Trinchera Luminosa): THE NEW YORKER (La Trinchera Luminosa) VILLAGE VOICE (Interkosmos): FILM COMMENT (Interkosmos): VARIETY (Interkosmos): More a series of similarly-themed sketches than a cohesively flowing unit, pic imagines East Germany leading the way in efforts to colonize the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Participating in the grand scheme for the betterment of an anti-capitalist world are cosmonauts Seagull (Nandini Khaund) and Falcon (helmer Finn), whose hesitant space romance, over intergalactic static, forms the core -- a deadpan recitation of "The Trolley Song" is priceless. Color footage is suitably tinged orange-pink with age, and music and art direction are impeccable; as a final tease, exit music is longer than in 'Gone With the Wind. [Jay Weissberg] MORE Jim Finn’s Wüstenspringmaus, a well-sprung, rear-screened account of a gerbil’s life in the Seventies.— Guy Maddin, Film Comment La Ardilla (2004), an entry
in Jim Finn's “lotería” video series, samples a
glowing Rocío Durcal and Juan Gabriel duet while the lovestruck
Finn courts a skittish amour. As the legends croon, “desde el
principio / te quiero, te quiero, te quiero”, Finn beckons tenderly,
patiently, and finally has you, and the squirrel, nibbling from his
seductively pursed lips. Finn's chilling Super-Max is tour of maximum security prisons shot from a moving car, their hulking forms framed by telephone poles and power lines that divide landscape and sky. The concluding voice-over, making reference to Lewis and Clark, implicitly equates the European occupation of this continent with imprisonment. — Fred Camper, Chicago Reader
|