BB

Cameron Jamie | USA | 2000 | 18' |

| IFFR 2008

Also in BB, Cameron Jamie focuses on a folk ritual that is set on the fringes of society. This time he films in the backyard of San Fernando Valley, the endless sprawling suburbs of Los Angeles since the 1950s. Here shopping malls and class-sensitive districts dominate the landscape with far from inspiring architecture and the inhabitants are almost forced into anonymous individualism. Cameron Jamie grew up there himself and portrays the way young people hold wrestling matches in their gardens that are most like a kind of organised and simulated violence. With several Super8 cameras at the same time, he films in black & white the way young men prepare for the duel by painting their faces and then surrendering in an improvised ring to a remarkable wrestling choreography that is aggressive but has its limits. Their ritualistic movements and appearance refer to the lucha libre, the professional wrestling matches, of South American origin, in which masked men measure up to each other and that they know from television. Accentuated by the drone of the soundtrack by The Melvins, their projections and interpretations now they are filmed themselves, acquire something of an initiation ritual that displays both archaic and hypermodern elements.

Also in this combined programme

Kranky Klaus

Recording of the annual Christmas folklore street ritual Krampus in Austria, in which people dressed up as hairy monsters scare the wits out of the
Artist in Focus: Cameron Jamie
Spook House

Documentary study about macabre Halloween decorations hanging in houses and gardens giving them the form of real torture rooms and frightening ceme
Artist in Focus: Cameron Jamie