So, really this is just a re-blog from Vanessa Bartlett, a writer and academic in London.
Vanessa kindly wrote an introductory essay for the last film I made with Ben Jeans Houghton as the ARKA group. It was a brilliant dissection of the themes and references in what was quite a dense, experimental film.
(You can read Vanessa's essay, From biophiliato bibliophilia……and then back again, by clicking here.)
Yesterday, Vanessa posted on her website a new version of the text, a parody authored by one Chris Warren, a second hand bookseller and typewriter aficionado. The parody is called Three Miles Wide: a decontextualised mushroom omelette, and I can say, as someone who has read Vanessa's essay quite a lot, it brilliantly re-works the language and scholarly references in her original text.
It's funny, picking apart the technical language of critical theory without being cynical, and what fascinates me the most is that, in its own more visual, anecdotal way, it manages to make pretty good points about the film, without the author having seen it.
Also, now that the ARKA group has been parodied (well, parodied by proxy), does that make us famous?