Sad
Disco Fantasia
(Smoke in Mirrors: Undulations of the Self, Nov. 22) is an autobiographical
short from a Canadian living in Los Angeles. Filmmaker Steve Reinke
doesn’t like L.A., but says it’s so pleasant he doesn’t
want to leave. (He now lives in Chicago.) Sad Disco Fantasia
records a turning point in Reinke’s life, when he decides to focus
his films on two things — flowers and boys — because “the
best art is the most beautiful art."
Eye-candy
is indeed included in the film’s 24 minutes. In addition to flowers,
Reinke’s camera captures a man manipulating his meat both in and
out of his tighty-whities. Much of Sad Disco Fantasia, however,
is a melancholy meditation on popular culture, with Seinfeldian riffs
on everything from piggy banks to why Michael Jackson grabs his crotch.
Reinke has created the quintessential experimental short — self-exploration,
deep thoughts, interesting images. And nudity.” ("Sex-ploration"
by Ian Hodder, Gay City News, Nov. 2002)
Reinke's
latest is the work of an artist in-between. With his characteristic
casually cutting humour, Reinke discourses on dislocations and death,
drawing on material shot in Canada and the States, on home movies and
digital animations, on circle jerks and Peanuts cartoons. Sad Disco
Fantasia wraps irony in irony, so that each statement, each image,
seems to imply its obverse, and then several possible versions of itself.
(Images Festival Catalogue, 2001)
A
gentler but no less mournful spirit inflects Steve Reinke's Sad
Disco Fantasia. Relocated temporarily to Los Angeles, the acerbic
videomaker says (jokingly, we hope) that this is his final video. Linking
the deaths of his mother and cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, porn and
Michael Jackson, Reinke mixes and matches hypnotic digital animations
with Super 8 and video footage to create a work of ironic, meditative
foreboding. It's a work that expertly sums up a festival where the message
remains much more significant than the medium. And where film and video
are analogous, digital or otherwise. ("The Images Festival"
by Jason McBride, Take One, 2001)
