Wednesday, September 17, 2008

the impossible library

British artists Onkar Kular and Noam Toran collaborate on art/film projects, including an upcoming film at the Somerset House in London. 

I find the concept for one of their past collaborations endlessly fascinating: An Impossible Library compiles what basically amounts to a morbid round-up of cinematic moments of dying in 10 categories, taken from over 150 films. Among the categories are dying singing, dying in arms, dying whilst lying down, etc. The proposal asserts their mission to catalogue every dying moment in the history of cinema, their first feature-length round-up as only the first installment in a series. I wish I could have had the doubtlessly eerie, macabre Borges-ian romp through cinematic deaths when it was first shown in a London gallery, although I imagine a full 2 hours of nothing but death might prove overwhelmingly weighty even for my depressive cinematic preferences (Lars von Trier films, Requiem for a Dream, which i have somehow subjected myself to 3 times now, French films about infidelity, Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach's sweetly devastating characters).

1 comment:

juliet small ernst said...

oh man, i want to see that! i need to forward this onto my sister, too--this is totally something she'd be into.

i was just reading about 'bonnie and clyde' today--now there's a screen death.