on the beach
fem van den elzen and tygo gernandt in naar de klote! (wasted!)
WASTED
* * *
(Dir. Ian Kerkhof)
Wasted is a joyride through ravesville, Amsterdam, which covers all the bases — extortive E dealers, big foolish debts, pounding music, asshole bouncers… the works. The threats are real, the deals gritty, and the people are beautiful. The color palette has somehow been limited to the sci-fi rave flyer, and this makes it look very, very, very cool. The words “eye candy” come to mind, especially owing to the gorgeous nudity and the dreamlike digital effects. In fact, I was often thrown out of the moment by such distractions as a multicoloured toilet bowl during a hard-core puking scene. “Wasted” is the first film I’ve seen which attempts to prove how cool your sex life would be if you were a rave DJ, but which at the same time fails to prove that there’s anything more to DJ’ing than having other people who everyone thinks are cool think you’re cool so they give you the official cool records of the week. But maybe that’s a Hollywood-style simplification they’re making?!
Patrick Harrison
this article first published by film threat
August 19th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
[…] One of the guests of this year’s Popcorn was Ian Kerkhof, a director from the Netherlands, who through his knowledge of film technologies, explores film as performance art. He has, among other achievements, made a digital video feature called “Wasted!” which he blew up to 35mm. Kerkhof is a cutting edge filmmaker who perhaps encapsulated the more alternative edge of Popcorn by arriving with an experimental documentary about the likewise experimental Japanese musician Merzbow. “Beyond Ultra Violence-Uneasy Listening by Merzbow” is an uncomfortable portrait of a man who concentrates on making sounds to which few would ascribe the term “music”. The video is a muddle of images and sounds that sets out to give you a feeling, not the whole picture, of a man who innovates the future. Ian Kerkhof wanted to make a video as rich and layered as Merzbow’s work and says that it would be nonsense to make a BBC-style documentary about him. A scene where a girl cuts her stomach open leaving all her entrails on the floor certainly makes the video less accessible. Some fainted, some threw up and a few chose to trash their Popcorn card after the screening, deliberately provoked by Kerkhof. […]
September 1st, 2006 at 6:42 pm
[…] The Snuff Collection is a necrology and an autopsy. In Kaganof’s self-reflexive ‘snuff’ the mediamatic body of the late Ian Kerkhof (1964-1999) is cut into, thoroughly examined and ultimately fetishised. Before he re-emigrated to his native South Africa, the young film-maker caused a furore in the Dutch film-world with films like Kyodai makes the Big Time (1992), The Mozart Bird (1993), Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers (1994), Wasted! (1996) and Shabondama Elegy (1999). In addition to those films he also staged pornologies, elements of which reappear in The Snuff Collection: The Solipsist (1992), Stations of the Cross (1990) and, la sequence des barres paralleles (The Sequence of the Parallel Bars) (1993) based on a script by Pierre Klossowski. […]