One of most exciting and unpredictable filmmakers working today, Brooklyn’s James N. Kienitz Wilkins (Indefinite Pitch, Locarno Festival in Los Angeles 2017)has made a name for himself over the last half-decade with an idiosyncratic collection of works that foreground language and performance while simultaneously upending expected formal boundaries. Tonight’s program features the Los Angeles premiere of the Andre Trilogy, three films that helped establish Wilkins’ playfully provocative, self-reflexive sensibility.
Films include:
Special Features (2014, 12 min)
Special Features is an apparent interview with three highlights. Presented as a lo-fi fragment from a forgotten video production, an interviewee interacts with an interviewer, recounting a special experience at once unique and shared.
TESTER (2015, 30 min)
A private eye type guy recounts a tricky case, set against the unedited duration of a found BetaSP tape.
B-ROLL with Andre (2015, 19 min)
An anonymous and mediated testimonial about one man’s dangerous dream.
Distinctive in their investigation of language, unconventional approach to performance, and exploration of conversation as a potent transmitter of ideas.
- Herb Shellenberger, The Brooklyn Rail
Kienitz Wilkins has successfully adapted some of the most critical weapons in the arsenal of
experimental cinema to produce a stark poetry of the everyday.
- Michael Sicinski, MUBI Notebook
A destabilized noir... [The Andre Trilogy's] three films focus on the dreams, memories and idiosyncratic theories espoused by each chapter’s respective narrator. Their stories contaminate one another, circling back on one another with an uncanny logic.
- Whitney Mallett, Filmmaker Magazine
Lectures, pitch meetings, talking-head interviews, detective narratives, and verité documentary have been used in [Wilkins's] previous films, most notably in the Andre Trilogy. These are forms that are recognizable, but which Wilkins flips over, shuffles around, and remixes, sometimes to the point of disarray.
- Craig Hubert, Hyperallergic
Among the funniest [filmmakers] working today... Wilkins's comic style can be placed in a Yankee deadpan tradition, but in the heady mixture of Fetty Wap, Grecian urns, Justin Timberlake, Oculus Rift VR headsets, and votive statuary, there’s something completely modern, something that speaks to 2016 in a way that Jean-Luc Godard’s juxtaposition of chrome, Cadillacs, and J.S. Bach might have spoken to prosperous Western Europe in the 1960s.
- Nick Pinkerton, frieze
(Available to download after screening date)