Efectos de familia (Family Effects, 2007–9) is a series of 13 videos that dramatize an array of abusive events derived from Edgardo Aragón’s family’s history—specifically its involvement with organized crime. Each episode is an action performed by some combination of his two young cousins, nephew, and younger brother. In one, a boy is shot to death inside a pickup truck.
Wild Boy is the story of the education of Amir, the artist’s son. Ben-Ner plays the educator’s part, trying to domesticate the child. Using the metaphor of the wild child is Ben-Ner’s homage to this recurring theme in literature and cinema: from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ « Tarzan » to Truffaut’s « L’enfant sauvage », and Rudyard Kipling’s « Jungle book ».
In his films, Guy Ben-Ner plays with the history of cinema, referring to the experimental origins of silent film, to comic figures such as Keaton and Chaplin, and to Truffaut’s French New Wave...