Sundance. Strange Culture.

"The surreal nightmare of internationally acclaimed artist and professor Steve Kurtz began when his wife Hope died in her sleep of heart failure," Lynn Hershman Leeson [site] tells SF360. "Medics arrived, became suspicious of Kurtz's art, and called the FBI. Within hours the artist was detained as a suspected 'bioterrorist' as dozens of agents in hazmat suits sifted through his work and impounded his computers, manuscripts, books, his cat, and even his wife's body."

Asked to "categorize" Strange Culture [site], her film about the case featuring Thomas Jay Ryan, Tilda Swinton, Peter Coyote and Josh Kornbluth, she replies, "Hybrid, tactical media, like Steve's work. It's kind of a portrait, in that way. Like everything I do, it defies categorization. One might think of it as a documentary, or even as a sci-fi, though."

David Carr meets her well and, for the New York Times, asks her about the work's virtual premiere on Second Life.

Gabriella Giannachi saw an early cut and wrote for the Presence Project, "I remember two moments that moved me to tears - Steve Kurtz talking about the fact that Tilda Swinton is playing Hope. 'I can't think of any better gesture of remembrance' - and... Swinton: 'The second she died even the gesture of making art changed.'"

"[Y]ounger filmmakers should be looking to Hershman Leeson for lessons on how to reinvent old forms while at the same time telling an urgently topical story," writes John Anderson in Variety.

Update: Karina Longworth at Netscape: "Strange Culture includes a good deal of nostalgia for the day in which the government put artists on the payroll - or at least declined to persecute them. 'Art isn't important in this country at all,' Hershman-Leeson says worriedly. 'You measure a society's progress by the art it produces. How will we be measured?'"

Update, 1/25:"[P]robably the best and certainly the most urgent film in the Frontier section," writes Dennis Lim for indieWIRE. "Completed just as President Bush bulldozed through the Military Commissions Act, which redefined habeas corpus for so-called enemy combatants, the film nails the mood of post-9/11 America: the paranoia, fear, and willful ignorance that the government has fostered and exploited. Strange Culture may have been the first film to reach Second Life avatars but one can only hope it has some impact in the real world."

Update, 1/29: Jason Silverman reports on the Second Life screening for Wired News.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Posted by dwhudson at January 22, 2007 2:28 AM