FILM
Storytelling Post-Digital Revolution
Seth Price probes Internet’s evolving impact on video art
BY STEVE ERICKSON
It’s far from unusual for fi lmmakers to deliver
multiple drafts of their fi lms for public
circulation, although the original cuts
that no one but their inner circle has a
chance to watch are usually too long for feature
length release.
“Blade Runner” has been released theatrically
in three different cuts, as has “Apocalypse
Now.” Wong Kar-wai re-edited his 1994 “Ashes
of Time” into “Ashes of Time Redux.” George
Lucas completely revamped his original “Star
Wars” trilogy in elaborate ways that ticked off
fans. Only two months after its original opening,
Ari Aster’s “Midsommar” was briefl y re-released
to theaters in a slightly longer, unrated
version.
In fact, unrated cuts, even of fi lms originally
rated PG-13, have long been a common marketing
gimmick for home video.
But Seth Price’s “Redistribution,” essentially
a video art project getting a week-long run at a
movie theater, is unusual in that the current
version is its eighth incarnation. The fi rst one
THEATER
Say the Right Thing
Pointed satire about everyone pretending not to offend
BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE
“Eureka Day,” the shiny, new play
by Jonathan Spector getting its
New York debut at Walkerspace
downtown, is a stealth satire.
Ostensibly, it’s a send-up of the torturously politically
correct lingui-nastics people put themselves
through to avoid offending anyone, be
inclusive to a fault, and never imply that their
ideas or identity might be intrinsically better
than another’s. But on a deeper, darker, and far
more interesting level, “Eureka Day” suggests
that no matter how language is decorated or
how one wears a mantle of sensitivity, the human
animal is — and will always be — fi ercely
competitive, egotistical, power-grabbing, and
hierarchical. Part of the icy, deliciously cynical
comedy of Spector’s piece is the message
that passive aggression is still aggression. And,
that, in the end, money wins.
The plot concerns a private school, the eponymous
Eureka Day, where the executive committee
confronts an outbreak of the mumps and
COURTESY OF SETH PRICE
Seth Price, seen in his fi lm “Redistribution.”
ROBERT ALTMAN
Tina Benko, Elizabeth Carter, and Thomas Jay Ryan in Jonathan
Spector’s “Eureka Day,” at Walkerspace through September 21.
its policy of not forcing vaccinations — complicated
by an order handed down requiring it to
send out a notice of mandatory vaccination.
Don, the white headmaster, in cargo shorts
and Teva sandals, moderates the proceedings,
was completed in 2007, and he considers it a
work-in-progress.
“Redistribution” begins at a lecture Price
gave in Kassel, Germany, about storytelling,
which turns out (at least as fi lmed and edited
here) to resemble a fashion show more than
anything else. Subtitled text describes the human
race’s need to describe our lives in stories
— possibly facetiously, Price suggests that serial
killers’ murderous compulsions lie in the
need to tell the same story over and over. But
onscreen at the same time, models appear in
white outfi ts and sunglasses designed by the
fashion line Folklore as house music pounds
away and lasers go off. This fi lm started out
with a lecture Price gave in which he explained
his approach to video, avoiding drawing either
from performance art or a conventional vision
of moviemaking, and much of it consists of that
footage. However, digital colors swirl around
the box where Price speaks.
Price’s aesthetic is often based around sensory
overload, with his voice, images, and sub-
➤ SETH PRICE, continued on p.37
and the members of the committee — Suzanne,
a white full-time mom; Meiko an Asian single
mother; Eli, a white, stay-at-home tech millionaire
dad; and Carina, the new member, a black
lesbian — come to blows when Carina refuses
to agree to continue allowing unvaccinated
children to attend. She butts heads with Suzanne,
a committed anti-vaxxer based a personal
experience who assumes that because
she’s a long-time parent and an original school
supporter she will be accommodated. But Eli
disagrees with Suzanne and his money is important
to the school, so she is sidelined.
Throw into the mix the racist assumptions
that Suzanne makes about Carina, Eli’s son
contracting the mumps and suffering complications,
and the school having to be closed,
which occasions a hilarious Facebook Live
meeting where Don tries to control the self-absorbed
parents.
All of this plotting and topicality come at a
cost — specifi cally the unsurprising fact that
➤ EUREKA DAY, continued on p.37
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