Derek Woolfenden
2021A Shine on Your Shoes
Derek Woolfenden
Metaphysics through the major genres (and open spaces) of American cinema and its golden age thanks to the shoes of the greatest dancers of Tap Dance of all time, The Nicholas Brothers trip. The actor and dancer Gregory Hines said that if one would like to do a biopic about them today, this would require CGI to replicate their dance number!
A Shine on Your Shoes
Acizo
Derek Woolfenden
Acizo is a found footage film created around the cult shower scene of Janet Leigh in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” ( 1960). Although the film does not feature any original “Psycho” footage, it preserves the subsequent cinematic heritage and imagery influenced consciously or not by Hitchcock’s film. ACIZO also keeps true to the length and scale of each shot. Bernard Hermann’s score is the only original element preserved.
Acizo
Que Sera Sera
Derek Woolfenden
A cynical, quasi-misanthropic film which, despite its childish appearance, manages to enumerate and decline some of the bestial mythologico-historical collectivities which have emerged from the collective imagination: Collodi's donkeys, the rats of Hamelin, Circe's pigs, Panurge's sheep, Pavlov's dogs. Contemporary television resembles a gigantic farm; the lure of success and fame which it offers is analogous to Pinocchio's experience when he was assured that he would never have to work again (lifelong entertainment) - and was transformed into a donkey! Individuality does not exist; Don Quichotte is not alone in believing in windmills.
Que Sera Sera
Lexique Dyslexique
Derek Woolfenden
An experimental fiction cut into six distinct parts that present the feeling of love as “precarious” fragments of identity. The ambition of these fragments is to retranscribe the personal affect of the film author as much as the more general one of a collective and common imaginary.
Lexique Dyslexique
Black's back
Derek Woolfenden
This film is based on a subjective and fantasized vision around a figurative fight that would oppose a Western imagination embodied by Disney and that linked to the political movements relating to the condition of blacks in the United States and to "Black Power".
Black's back
That's Entertainment
Derek Woolfenden
The representative possibilities of fiction films (especially American B movies) are often usurped and censored: this is where they get their revenge, reclaim their rights and rebel against the role of information provider which, more often than not, leads to visual overdose. This overload is more manipulative than informative, as the events of September 11th demonstrate: representational taboos (media complacency, morbid speculation about events on the plane and inside the Twin Towers) combine with a collective fantasy which reconfigured the events as a collective nightmare.
That's Entertainment
Mirodrome (Peepshow 1 et 2)
Derek Woolfenden
A diptych whose two panels merge in an exterior-to-interior movement: billboards and neon signs solicit passersby and transform them into spectators of the boulevard's numerous and infernal sex dens, themselves a pure product of consumerism - an indissociable element of contemporary orgasmic pleasure.
Mirodrome (Peepshow 1 et 2)