Film Season: I’m Too Happy
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
Rachel Maclean’s unsettling, rainbow-dipped work is full of references to Disney princesses, horror films and fairy tales. So it makes perfect sense for HOME to accompany Wot u 🙂 about?, their exhibition of Maclean’s work, with a season of films that digs into her influences and cinematic affinities. Selected by Maclean herself, alongside curator Bren O’Callaghan, the season expands upon themes within the artist’s works that address childhood, happiness and innocence as a context, state or quality ripe for commodification and exploitation.
On Saturday 3rd December HOME are showing Alice, acclaimed Czech animator Jan Švankmajer’s surreal adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic tale. Like Maclean, Švankmajer combines live action with animation and visual effects in order to craft an inventive work that both delights and disturbs.
Where the Czech director uses stop-motion, Maclean uses computer generated effects in combination with old-fashioned make-up to transform herself into multiple characters in her 2015 film Feed Me. Screening on Monday 5th December Maclean’s parable of the pleasures and perils of indulgence showcases the extravagance and excess of her artistic palette.
Canadian auteur Guy Maddin concludes the season on Tuesday 13th December with his 2003, depression era tale, The Saddest Music in the World. Starring Isabella Rossellini (Blue Velvet) as a beer baroness who sponsors a competition to find the world’s saddest song, Maddin’s stylish oddity is “part musical melodrama, part tongue-in-cheek social satire and part phantasmagoria.”
