Alfredo2000

ALFREDO is a 16mm film-to-video portrait of the artist Alfredo Martinez. The film watches Alfredo shooting guns, hanging out, playing video games, and working on guns. Sound was recorded during the filming, but it became evident during editing that the film was more evocative as a silent movie. "Alfredo . . . grew out of a firing range installation created by the conceptual artist Alfredo Martinez for the group show, "Quiet," in Tribeca. Ostensibly a silent portrait of the artist, the film's grainy, high-contrast montage of Martinez loading, shooting, stripping, and reassembling a frightening assortment of exotic, high-powered rifles and automatic pistols is implicitly mirrored by Jarmusch putting his own 16mm equipment through its paces. Images are over cranked, under cranked and then optically printed as freeze frames. By its climax, the film pointedly suggests a direct parallel between the violence and obsession of Martinez's onscreen fetishism and the invasive, voyeuristic assault of the cinema camera." – Bill Raden