Zoo Liquid Prototype1997

A film out of NYC's Downtown World of artists and poets, inhabited by living poets and driven by their words. I used what author/filmmaker Carl Linder calls organic filmic selection, the process where the visual image is allowed to "grow out of itself." I also used B&W single frame takes and short bursts of 12 frames per second (half the normal rate of 24 frames per second) to get a feel for the texture of Downtown. Zoo. . . is a film that doesnt let you forget you are watching a film. Zoo is the modern "urban city" – in this case New York City, with side trips to San Francisco. Liquid is the "nature" of its dwellers. Prototype, a "model" of our direction to a future that fosters contentions with a rise to conflicts and contradictions that will not offer resolutions but only a rubbing together of persons. The films main character, Gun, is a performance artist of the Downtown NYC scene. In her performance piece, she plays the poet, Emily Dickinson, taking her stage name, Gun, from Emilys poem, I stood a Loaded Gun. Her performance, Mystery upon Mystery, reveals her path to becoming a performance artist and it is where she acts out a timeless artist manifesto taken from Emilys life and work. She acts as narrator between the fragments of conflict with simple straight forward acts of physical contact to the final question of death-dealing violence: "Should I kill Jeff or that Gun bitch" Zoo demands several viewings and a close reading of the subtexts. It comes with a CD-ROM.