Sunday, February 2, 2014

Liz Knox | Synopses



Liz Knox
Synopses
Vancouver, Canada: Self-published, 2013
116 pp., 23 x 15 cm., softcover
Edition of 50 signed, numbered and date-stamped copies

Scenarios for fifty-five films are laid out, one to a page. At times they sound like they could be read by the voice-over artist for a particularly ambiguous trailer:

One kiss. A duel. Two men with bandages on their heads. 

Others read like descriptions for comedic shorts:

A woman loses her robe. A man teases her. 

In fact the films are classic hollywood features. The above two are Michael Powell's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. Others include Guys and Dolls, Torn Curtains, How To Steal a Million and Dr Strangelove.

The descriptions are like found poems, lifted directly from user-generated content advisories posted to the Internet Movie Database. Idiosyncratically reductive, the texts reveal contemporary North American  taboos:  nudity, sex, violence, smoking and drinking.

The book is bound in a cover made to resemble a Kraft file folder and is available from the artist's website, here.




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