One Minute To Act A Title: Kim Jong Il Favorite Movies

2005

3 min

Mario Garcia Torres

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Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films. Indeed rather surprisingly Kim seems to have had a huge collection of Western videos and he published a book called “On the art of the Cinema” in 1973. As the final acknowledgments indicate, Garcia Torres’s work was produced following in depth research, consulting information given by director Shin Sang-ok who has been kidnapped by Kim in 1978, as well as Jerrold Post (The George Washington University) and Timothy Savage (Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development). The motion pictures represented are, in order of appearance: Doctor Zhivago by Craig Wadlin; First Blood by Misti Traya; From Russia with Love by Vanessa Koellner; You Only Live Twice by Nate Harrison; The Godfather by Roberto Medina; Friday the 13th by Gregory Arlt; and Gone With The Wind by Margarita Reyes. Cinematographer: Kevin Merz. The old-fashioned grainy black and white film stock bring a certain distance or an artistic remove from these otherwise known actors in TV series or cinema. The approach is typically modest in presentation in the mode of performance art of the 1970s. The actors’ gestures hilariously attempt to represent a film at great speed. The success rate seems high as they evoke the popular culture they are charged to communicate. Strangely effectively they also capture general hints of violence and melodrama in the dictator’s taste.

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Mario García Torres is a conceptual artist who engages with various media in his practice, including film, sound, performance, ‘museographic installations’ and video. García Torres often cites untold or ‘minor’ histories, with a predilection for avant-garde art and music from the 1960s and 70s as departing points for his work. He has recreated historical exhibitions and has even ‘completed’ unfinished artworks, often blurring original and reenactment, past and present, while questioning universal ideas about truth, certainty and time – all core ideas in the development of his body of work.

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Colors:

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• dictator.n.01
• entertainment.n.01
• wit.n.01
• politics.n.01
• popular.s.04
• culture.n.01
• calarts
• collective history
• contemporary conceptualism
• film/video
• mexican
• mexican contemporary artists
• monochrome