chain

… can also refer to the initiation of a reaction … relinking me back to a recent post on N.Klein’s essay Inside the Stomach of the Dragon: The Victory of the Entertainment Economy on reblog journal

We all essentially live inside the stomach of the “entertainment” dragon. As a result, it would be near impossible to generate an avant-garde strategy in a world that feels increasingly like an outdoor shopping mall, what I call a scripted space. Try to find a principle boulevard in any of the major cities in Europe or the United States that hasn’t been rescripted into a kind of outdoor mall.

.. in case of the mentioned associative reaction I was reading about the film Chain (via). The information given just perfectly seemed to support Klein’s comments above …

Chain takes as its subject and setting the homogenised interzones of privately owned public space – shopping malls, hotel complexes, theme parks – that multinational corporations have remade in their own global-branded image, letting regional colour fade to a concrete grey. A hybrid of fiction and documentary, and a brilliantly discomfiting twist on the “location shoot”, Chain is also something of a Ballardian horror story.

“I was trying to get a grip on the nature of globalisation, which is such a hazy, amorphous term,” says the Brooklyn-based 42-year-old, who shot Chain on 16mm film over seven years. (Guardian)

A longer interview with the filmmaker has been published on cinemascope ..

Chain is a movie in establishing shots. Except that these shots serve the opposite purpose: obscuring and disorienting – dis-establishing, if you will. (Let’s note in passing that another term for the establishing shot is the “linking” shot.)

.. the introduction of this article connects Jem Cohen’s style and obvious influences to Chris Marker’s La Jetée – this remarkable film which was just recently put into a relocating context of influences and names on a designobserver post.

>> mind the __ GAP* ?

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