Tuesday, May 5, 2009

My Site-Work

"Epic story of a mysterious stranger with a harmonica who joins forces with a notorious desperado to protect a beautiful widow from a ruthless assassin working for the railroad."


The bodies are here (1:44 in the trailer above):




Taking the Cinematic Real or a Pictures reality as my site--this same real which has brought us all here to the Deep End Blog, by way of Site Work, by way of CalArts, by way of a cinematic (that is to say image-based and illusionistic) perception of the American West--I have re-staged the preceding scene of cowboy carnage at Deep End Ranch.

From an industrialist's fantasy ranch to a giraffe infested safari to a Los Angeles-area artist residency, the image-reality of the site- is continually molded by its occupants. If not progress, then at least a reiteration: my fantasy onto Sergio Leone's definitive WESTERN, onto the Deep End's definitive terminal fantasies.

As the railroad signals the end of the West, Leone's film connects a constellation of classic Westerns into one epic terminus. The cinema at once generates and suffocates the fantasy (this being my site-). The video is littered with corpses, confusion, poetry. A sunset for the Western itself to ride into, or to track into on a dolly.


Brica Wilcox plays the recognizable corpses,
the litter of character actors. Instead of a train car
at the end of the railroad, there is a ranch house,
a swimming pool, an orchard at the edge
of the sprawl of Los Angeles.

"You interested in fashion, Harmonica?"

"I saw three of these dusters a short time ago,
they were waiting for a train.
"Inside the dusters there were three men."

"So?"

"Inside the men there were three bullets."

"That's a crazy story, Harmonica. For two reasons.
One:
Nobody around these parts got the guts
to wear those dusters except Cheyenne's men.
"Two:
CHEYENNE'S MEN DON'T GET KILLED."


CHEYENNE'S MEN DON'T GET KILLED.

Well but the women? But those of us that aren't Cheyenne's?
But the images? Can you kill an image, or does it just move,

the bone smashed down and resurfacing elsewhere, the blood
squirting out another
hole?

2 comments:

  1. Is the notorious desperado, Charlie "One Shot" Dushea... and the beautiful widow, Estella Converse?

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