Remainder

Omer Fast’s video installation The Casting is based on interviews held with a U.S. Army sergeant before his renewed deployment in Iraq. Fast describes the project: “During several days he told me two stories which I have interwoven. The first took place in Bavaria and describes the sergeant’s relationship with a German girl who loves speed and self-mutilation. The second story takes place outside Baghdad and deals with a bomb on the roadside and a tragic mistake.” Fast took these two stories and processed them into a screenplay, which he then had interpreted by actors as a series of silent tableaux.

It follows a young German soldier returning to his parents’ house after serving in Afghanistan; the action repeats three times, with the soldier played by a different actor in each version. According to the press materials, and to several people I spoke to about the film, this is the story of a family seeking to reconstruct their lost son’s return by hiring a series of male prostitutes. Certainly this implication is there: incest thrums throughout, like a threat; the father exploring the younger man’s mouth with his fingers, the mother climbing into his bed. But it seems to me that Continuity is more obviously involved with Fast’s enduring themes of repetition, trauma and the fraught ways in which conflict becomes news, fiction or documentary.

Everything That Rises Must Converge is a hybrid documentary/fiction film. It follows four real-life adult film performers as they start their day at home, get in their cars and drive to work in a nondescript residential house in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. In between documentary scenes, we also encounter several fictional characters whose stories revolve around the same residential house where the performers work. Shown as a grid of four simultaneous images, the film weaves scenes of everyday life with moments of beauty, as well as the strange and absurd moments of apparent convergence.

A family’s conflict with a ghost.

Continuity begins as a straight-forward story of an emotional homecoming and turns uncanny as the two protagonists – a middle aged couple living in a small town in Germany – repeatedly invite different young men into their home to perform an inscrutable ritual. This is a remake of Continuity (2012) by the same director, expanding on the original idea.

Short film about a photographer.

5000 Feet is the Best is a film based on two conversations that artist Omer Fast conducted in the fall of 2010 with a former Predator Drone aerial vehicle operator-turned Las Vegas casino security guard. The interviews are the seedbed from which Fast has pulled themes of remote warfare and the psychological effects of it on the Drone pilot, suggesting the implications of these things on current culture at large. Fast’s film sutures together reality and fiction and deflects any pat or partisan readings.