Festival Forum: International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2020
Dirty Pictures
John Smith
2007
14 Minutes
Palestine
Festival Forum
Date
Friday, May 22, 2020
e-flux and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen are pleased to present John Smith’s Dirty Pictures, the third film in the joint series From My Window / From Your Window.
“To the question of how one travels and collects images without objectifying, John Smith answers by shooting the generic in place of the exotic. In Dirty Pictures, an Englishman travels to Palestine but instead of showing us the long lines at the checkpoints, the military artillery on display or the unbearable poverty inflicted on the general population, he elects to shoot the familiar interior of two common hotel rooms. But nothing is ever entirely banal in the West Bank, or so it seems. As the wind from the window of his room hits the ceiling, the tiles start moving up and down. Off-camera, Smith explains that this newly renovated hotel reopened recently after being requisitioned by the Israeli army in 2000 at the start of the second Intifada because of its strategic location on top of a hill. The surreal movement of the tiles becomes a poetic reminder of the building’s haunted past.”
—Frédéric Moffet, curator’s statement, “I don’t want to tell you who I am,” Cinéma Parallèle, Montreal, 2008
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