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21st Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival Kickoff Event - Day One @ 8pm
- Details
- Category: Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival at Artsfest!
DATE: Friday May 24, 2019 Starts promptly @ 8PM
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: Free (Donations to the festival are appreciated!)
*Graphic Content: No Children Are Permitted At This Screening
BOILED ANGELS: THE TRIAL OF MIKE DIANA
The unbelievable true story of the first U.S. artist convicted of obscenity.
A Documentary Film Screening
Presented in Person by Mike Diana
Narrated by Dead Kennedys' vocalist Jello Biafra!
Come out and see this fascinating documentary about Comic Book Artist MIKE DIANA. Just how far can you push the First Amendment? Come see the story of this very interesting individual and engage in discussion with him after the movie. This documentary film was made by Cult Film Director - Frank Hennenlotter (Basketcase, Brain Damage, Frankenhooker). Mike Diana is a working underground cartoonist who was convicted of obscenity in Gainesville, Florida in 1994. Diana has also appeared as an actor in several films by the legendary underground filmmaker Mike Kuchar.
21st Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival - Day Two - Daytime Screenings
- Details
- Category: Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival at Artsfest!
DATE: Saturday, May 25th @ 12 noon
VENUE: Civic Club of Harrisburg
12 noon – Medium Form Documentaries, 48 min
Life on the Mississippi
Bill Brown, 28min, USA, 16mm
A short essay film about a river and the limits of knowing it. Using Mark Twain’s "Life on the Mississippi" as a road map, Brown travels from Memphis, Tennessee to New Orleans and considers some strategies for rehearsing, abstracting, and encountering the Mississippi River.
Sweet Love
Stephen Crompton, 20min, USA, Digital
“I was thinking of writing something totally absurd; to take the genre of softcore porn, and merge it with the concept of the Theatre of the Absurd” - Alvin Bojar Alvin Bojar, a retired entertainment producer, now lives in Sun City Center, Florida, which is one of the state’s many so-called “active living” communities for persons over-55. Alvin sees his current home as a sort of “heaven’s waiting room”, but his sense of humour endures. From the confines of this retirement dreamscape, Alvin recounts his experiences, from more than forty years earlier, of writing and producing a bizarre softcore porn film called Fongaluli.
1:00 PM – At War with the Sky: A Social Documentary Shorts Program, 42 min
UNSOLICITED
Meg Cook, 1min, USA, Digital
A woman's initial excitement at getting a message quickly turns sour. Based on the all too common experience of receiving an unsolicited 'dick pic'.
At War with the Sky
William Randall, 10min, USA/Japan, 16mm
A film essay on the Sanrizuka Series by Ogawa Production: Protest, land, airplanes, cops, government, riot police, hired thugs, violence, Molotov cocktails, more protests, farmers, kids, and it's fifty years later and we're still At War with the Sky.
Immunity Not Limitation
Sara Kazemimanesh, 3min, Iran/USA, 16mm
This film is about the experience of mandatory hijab and the creeping violence it caters to. The concept behind the film was inspired by a series of instructional urban banners displayed in different cities of Iran. These banners collectively likened women who lack proper hijab to unwrapped candy surrounded by a swarm of flies.
From Markov to Skripal
John Barlow, 15min, UK, 8mm
The attempted assassination of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the sleepy English town of Salisbury in 2018 captured the attention of the world. It was just one of a string of deaths and attempted murders in Southern England with reported links to Russia. Beginning in the Cold War, this pattern has recently intensified, situating many otherwise mundane locations at the centre of an international geopolitical power struggle. The experimental short, From Markov to Skripal, visits and traces a chronological path through all seventeen of these locations, from Waterloo Bridge 1978 to Salisbury 2018, revealing the dark events which took place there.
Take it Down
Sabine Gruffat, 12min, USA, 16mm
What is up must come down, like the confederate soldier monuments standing in court house squares. At long last, a grand inversion! Solarized film makes positives bleed into negatives. In the context of the divisive Trump presidency and the increasing visibility of white supremacist activism, these memorials have become sites of conflicting politics and historical narratives. Historians agree that a majority of confederate statues were erected as propaganda tools legitimizing racism in the era of Jim Crow laws. For example, “Silent Sam”, a statue depicted in the film, was erected in the center square of the flagship University of North Carolina campus. In an act of civil disobedience, students and protestors tore down the statue in a statement against white supremacist oppression.
2 PM – Ghost Light: An Abstract Experimental Film Program, 44 min
The Equatorial Calms
Derek Taylor, 4min, USA, 16mm
Optical ruminations on an unpredictable region of Earth where raging storms and calm waters coexist. Seafarers are not only contained within this indeterminate state, but also within the film frame.
Lines of Force
Dan Browne, 2min, Canada, Digital
The theory of general relativity states that all matter is condensed energy. In its purest form, energy is light. Perhaps matter cannot go faster than light because all matter consists of light.
Clarabóia
Michael Lyons, 2min, Japan, Super 8
A poetic look at a Porto skylight filmed over three days using three different Super 8 film stocks. One of the stocks is decades-old Kodachrome, hand-developed using coffee and vitamin C.
The Sequence of Years
Ben Balcom, 9min, USA/Austria, Digital
I am old where I was born. It must have been magnificent once. The way it appears now is not how it was. It couldn’t be. Otherwise this would be something else. Perhaps for a moment I am there again. But when I open my eyes, I can’t remember anything. There is only the longing for a place I've never been.
Ghost Light
Sean Bokenkamp, 26min, Canada, 16mm
A “ghost light” is the lamp left burning overnight in a theatre so that the ghosts of actors can once more strut and fret for an hour upon the stage. Ghost Light examines the process whereby a person recovers and moves on after the connective threads that once existed between two people have been severed. Our past selves can become the ghosts that haunt us in the present. To work free of a tangled knot one has to send the needle back into the snarl. Ghost Light was produced with the assistance of the National Film Board of Canada – Filmmaker Assistance Program.
3 PM – Memoria Data: Home Movies and Diary Shorts, Part I, 41 min
Mototanaka Dérive
Michael Lyons, 4min, Japan, Super 8
The film documents an aimless walk through one of Kyoto's former outcaste neighbourhoods, which continues to exist below normal Japanese living standards. Despite pro-active legislation, people from families associated with such areas can experience discrimination. The soundtrack was created using a self-built apparatus we call 'The Octopus'. Voltages from light sensors on the projection screen control an analogue modular synthesizer allowing the film itself to act as a score.
Foreclosed Home Movie
Lisa Danker, 8min, USA, 16mm
A memoir of losing a home in 1930, in Miami, becomes the sister tale to a foreclosure in 2013. Unable to accept the loss of her foreclosed home, the filmmaker’s mother recounts its rooms and features. Photographs and abstractly animated details of the house and its furniture—printed from linoleum blocks directly onto 16mm film––alternate with the memoir of the 1920s, echoing the cyclical nature both of economic booms (and busts) and of trauma.
Who can shoot a firefly?
Emma Piper-Burket, 3min, USA, Super 8
Light pollution, pesticides, and reduced habitat (people over-manicuring their lawns) are negatively impacting firefly populations around the country. Two summer nights in a row I cried myself to sleep thinking about having to live in a world without fireflies. Who Can Shoot a Firefly? was at first conceived as a PSA to raise awareness about creating firefly habitat, but as I set out with my roll of 500T super8 film one dusky night I quickly discovered the ephemerality of both my subject matter and chosen medium. The glow of the firefly lasts but a passing moment, the film is running and there is only a finite amount left. Edited in camera.
Two
Vasilios Papaioannu, 8min, USA, 16mm/4k/MiniDV
Two filmmakers set out to create an audio archive for possible use in future projects. She records ambient sounds, vocally annotating them with a brief description; he films the environments through which they pass. In this archive of sound and image, love is a series of moments made sacred by the present. While nothing is resolved, perhaps in the hushed interplay between the woman and the man, between her sounds and his images, "the end and the beginning were always there." (T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets)
And By The Night
Anna Kipervaser, 10min, USA, 16mm
After a period of no revelations, Surah al-Duha was revealed to Prophet Muhammad, stating that God had neither forsaken nor forgotten him. And to be patient. The film is also a response to my abortion.
Consolar (to console)
Susan DeLeo, 5min, USA, Super 8
A short poetic piece shot on Super 8mm film inspired from a line of a traditional Spanish folksong "Asturiana." "To see if it would console me, I drew near."
Winter's First Moons
Kathleen Rugh, 3min, USA, 16mm
Following the winter solstice, the longest nights of the year prevail. Through these darkest nights the moon reaches to its fullest. Filmed over numerous nights the moons of different phases are brought together in the black sky. Through multiple exposures on film and editing created in-camera, the moons move and bounce off one another in unpredictable ways. Official NASA sound recordings from space help activate their actions. The stoic moon breaks free and gravitates at will.
4 PM – Memoria Data: Home Movies and Diary Shorts, Part II, 41 min
TAKE A PICTURE
Josh Weissbach, 3min, USA, Super 8
When there is simultaneously life and death, there is always more than a stillness.
As Tides Go By
Stefanie Weberhofer, 13min, Austria, Super 8
With the death of her grandmother, the desire of the filmmaker for a family vacation was seemingly unfulfillable. By combining Super8 film footage from five decades, the filmmaker fulfills this wish nonetheless. The change of generations seems to be stopped by the continuity of the film technology, blurring the limits of time in the Bay of Lignano.
Light plays
Anne-Marie Bouchard, 7min, 16mm
Remix, experimental animation, old technologies, 16mm: this film is about film! Old footage from 16mm film is scratched, drawn upon, experimentally animated with a quantum dots solution. The film seems at first about sound, the moon, and exotic birds, but it is, for me, more about narration, experimentation, and playfulness.
Street Styles
Jason Allen Lee, 3min, USA, 16mm
Manhattan is alive with contrasting styles during NYFW 2018. Shot on beautiful 16mm black and white film in the streets of New York City. Street Styles is a celebration of the individual.
Dull Hope
Brian Ratigan, 3min, USA, Digital/8mm
Suppressed memories reach a boiling point. An animated tale of longing. Original music and sound design by Nick Punch. Produced by Non Films
Memoria Data
Lori Felker, 12min, USA, Various/Found Footage
Memoria Data collects the moments of connection from various and distant familial archives. Familiar eyes make contact with the lens, gestures are tossed to the camera operator, and mouths spill unheard words. These images remind us of why we keep records, who we set our sights upon, and exactly how we felt when our camera was running. Music by Patrizia Oliva Commissioned by the Chicago Film Archives and Lab 80 Film - Cinescatti Archive.
21st Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival - Day Two @ 7:30pm
- Details
- Category: Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival at Artsfest!
DATE: Saturday May 25, 2019 Starts promptly @ 7:30PM
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: Free / No Advance Tickets / Tickets will be available at the cinema starting at 5pm the day of the event
*Donations to the festival are appreciated!
WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (New HD Transfer) Presented In Person by Director Todd Solondz ( With a Post Film Q&A)
Come out and enjoy a great screening as part of our annual film festival and see this amazing 1996 Sundance Award Winning film with director Todd Solondz (Happiness, Weiner Dog) presenting the film in person and hosting a Q&A post screening! Todd Solondz is a legend in the independent film world and this is the feature that started it all! This is a very special opportunity for our Harrisburg audiences!
The film is Rated R for Language
Description:
Middle-school student Dawn Weiner (Heather Matarazzo) faces degradation at school -- where she is teased constantly -- and at home. The middle child between nerdy older brother Mark (Matthew Faber) and perky younger sister Missy (Daria Kalinina), Dawn can't seem to find a place to belong. Although she has a crush on a cute boy (Eric Mabius) whom her brother knows, she can only catch the attention of bully Brandon (Brendan Sexton Jr.), who threatens her to show affection.
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114906/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_to_the_Dollhouse
21st Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival - Day Two @ 10:00pm
- Details
- Category: Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival at Artsfest!
DATE: Saturday May 25, 2019 @ 10:00PM
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
ADMISSION: Free *Donations to the festival are encouraged
FUTURE LANGUAGE - The Dimensions of Von Lmo Presented In Person by Filmmaker Lori Felker With a Post Film Q&A
Come out and experience this rare opportunity to see this documentary film about the great VON LMO. Artist and Musician VON LMO was a part of the great No Wave music scene in NYC playing with Red Transistor & Rudolph Grey - among others.
"Red Transistor... Von LMO sang and played guitar and Rudolph Grey was on guitar or bass and it was total insanity. Von LMO was a nut, a great nut.
I was afraid to be in the same room as him. One night they played at Max's and everyone was too afraid to sit up front as they smashed guitars and things were flying all over the place. I went into the front room in fear of my life and tried to get everyone to come with me. Nobody came with me because it was such an intense show."
- Alan Vega (Suicide)
Description:
A distorted portrait of an artist that explores storytelling, ego, delusion, conviction and memory. VON LMO is a musician/artist and self-proclaimed alien-hybrid who was a part of the late 70s New York No Wave music scene. Between trips to his home planet of Strazar and multi-dimensional travel, VON has also spent some very real time in prison and on the streets of Earth. Challenged with translating his Future Language for audiences across the galaxy, Lori, our filmmaker and VON LMO fan, gets sucked into VON's orbit and finds herself lost in his story.
21st Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival - Day Three - Daytime Screenings
- Details
- Category: Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival at Artsfest!
DATE: Sunday, May 26th @ 12 noon
VENUE: Civic Club of Harrisburg
12 Noon - Tales of Horror! 42min
The Radiation Monster
Eli & Leo Richards, 4min, USA, Digital
A radiation monster gets taken down by two Middletown, PA men, saving the town from nuclear fallout.
Dancing Queen
Neil Ira Needleman, 2min, USA, Digital
An epic tale of adversity, struggle, and persistence, accompanied by an intense musical score that makes Mahler seem like ABBA.
cockroach
Paul Ouellette, 3min, USA, 16mm
A young man kills a bug and this worries him
The Black Basilisk
Edward Loupe, 10min, USA, 16mm
A woman, trying to get away with murder, receives help from the creature who lives in the drain under her bathroom sink. A short horror story in the vein of 'The Twilight Zone'.
Onikuma
Alessia Cecchet, 12min, Italy/USA, Digital
Onikuma is Japanese yokai, a demon bear known for chasing horses. Surrounded by a foreign landscape, two women will understand that demons can come in different forms.
All Happened Before
Gloria Mercer, 5min, Canada, 16mm
Amanda is a restless young girl coping with her babysitter moving away. After a traumatic incident, she is forced to reckon with saying goodbye to her childhood.
Lodged
Heath Hofmeister, 6min, USA, Digital
The tale of a man with places to go in a world that doesn't work. A sci-fi drama set in a near future world.
1 PM – The Space Between: A Program of Formative Explorations, 51 min
Reasonable Watchfulness
Talena Sanders, 8min, Portugal/Spain/USA, 16mm
Transitions while longing for other places and people, like a fox on the run.
Story of the Dreaming Water - Chapter Two
Brittany Gravely, 3min, USA, 16mm
Maybe there was an opening, and they wandered through...
Catherine
Marcy Saude, 10min, UK, 16mm
A few scenes from a lesser-known Grimm’s fairytale, transposed to the West Cumbrian landscape, quickly jettisoning half the story. A woman’s work and (mis)adventures; low-key folk magic and/ as squatting tactics; traces of process, misrecognition, ocean vistas, fells. “What we want is nice shit for everybody.”
The Space Between Two Figures
Rebecca Reynolds, 6min, USA, 16mm
Hidden tensions within an existing narrative are released as identical cousins transform the stereotype into the intense impulses of phantasmatic simulacra. Images from a B/W 1960’s TV sitcom are reshot and manipulated with in-camera effects & editing, onto age-fogged color negative film stock. Bolex, matte box, single frame advance/ rewind blu-ray player & monitor are utilized to create a mock optical printer. Excerpts from the writings of Pierre Klossowski, Gilles Deleuze, Marguerite Duras and Scott Durham are fashioned into a poem of sorts.
Listen
Luca Guo, 3min, USA, 16mm
16mm student experimental film
Interstices Volume II
Michelle Latimer/John Woods/Brian Kent Gotro/Kyle Whitehead, 9min, Canada, Super 8
Interstices is an ongoing series of 'exquisite corpse' films with the potential to continue indefinitely. The films are all in-camera double exposures each made on a 15 metre reel of Super 8 film in collaboration with another artist or filmmaker; the second exposure is made with no prior knowledge of the first, resulting in vignettes that are aleatoric collisions of two discrete perspectives.
When Man Encountered the Island
Laurids Andersen Sonne, 8min, Denmark, 16mm
When Man Encountered the Island, he realized that he was no more than a foil for something larger, beyond his own immediate environment, beyond his experiential realm.
2 PM – Safe Space: A Kitchen Sink Shorts Program, 40 min
Johnny Labelle music video
Karissa Hahn/Andrew Kim, 3min, USA, 16mm
Track 06
A Collection of Attempts In Astral Travel
Ryan Betschart/Rachel Nakawatase, 7min, USA, 16mm
In 1990 parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo, an expert in the study of astral projection and an accomplished oboe player, was murdered in his Northridge home. The crime remains unsolved. A fleeting glimpse into a world of vibrant colors and luscious curves. Images glide, swell, and envelop one another to a tempestuous original score of looped and delayed oboe and sonar pings. Shot and printed on 16mm.
An Eastardly Journey
Ben Popp, 10min, USA, Digital
A voyage into hidden places just behind nature's veil.
There Must Be a Safe Space to Load the Building Materials
Ryan Betschart, 4min, USA, Digital
Interpretation of a dream I had building a house with stock animation and Migos stuck in my head. Central to my dream was the worry: Is there a Safe Space to Load the Building Materials?? There must be.
Miraculous Aqueduct
David Finkelstein, 16min, USA, Digital
A poetic exploration of the sources of creativity. Do we take a scattershot approach to inspiration, throwing ideas out at random, to see which ones take root? Or can we plug directly into a never-ending source of new ideas, an effortless flow? Miraculous Aqueduct is a journey through an interior landscape filled with tarot cards, towers, and centurions; a collage of words, images and music, in which the film’s two narrators discover that acknowledging inner blocks is the key to overcoming them.
3 PM – Animation Attack!!! 51 Min
Beyond the Ball
Dana Sink, 4min, USA, Digital
Beyond the Ball is a visual acknowledgement of situations that are not what they appear.
Fresh Green
Ida Greenberg, 5min, USA, Digital
In an empty bar, a lone patron plays a game of pool.
Toasted
Chad Janusch, 12min, USA, Digital
An intoxicated bottle of bourbon, fearful of being recycled, relies on the ingenuity of his household appliance friends to devise an escape plan.
Fun More
Wally Chung, 1min, USA, Digital
A war of words leads to an epic standstill.
Grandma
Dana Sink, 29min, USA, Digital
A man's reflection on life after experiencing the death of his grandmother.
21st Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival - Day Three - Closing Night Shorts Program @ 7pm
- Details
- Category: Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival at Artsfest!
DATE: Sunday, May 26th @ 7pm
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
Prologue to the Tarot: Glenna
Brittany Gravely/Ken Linehan, 7min, USA 16mm
GLENNA is the first in a set of cinematic tarot cards in which we collaborate with the subjects to create layered vignettes infused with personal symbolism.
Telekinesis Lesson 6
Brittany Gravely/Ken Linehan, 7min, USA, 16mm
Telekinesis Lesson 6 features kinetic performances in the intimate realms of ritual, ceremony, art and play – where the natural and supernatural intersect.
The Last Skate
Sandy McLennan, 5min, Canada, Super 8
The end of a decades-rare season for skating the entirety of smoothly-frozen lakes near home: Regular 8mm Bolex cameras double-exposing, sometimes a pinhole for a lens, hand-processed with various recipes and physicalities. The cameras failed miserably/wonderfully in the cold. Sound is not looped; you could skate forever. The living lake rumbles just under foot, solid and liquid. A naturally scary and oh so temporary place on earth. Spring begins to birth itself from the deep; winter had its turn.
Nutrition Fugue
Péter Lichter, 4min, Hungary, 35mm
"Közért" (translation: "for the public") was a government owned chain of stores in Hungary, during the communist era (1948-1989). The word Közért is still used in the Hungarian language. Our film was made from the 35 mm celluloid raw footage of its advertisement: the film strips were digged in the soil, rotten with food and cut up in pieces.
Toilet Tale
James Hollenbaugh, 5min, USA, Super 8
A traumatic experience in 1964 causes a family to experience a lifetime of bathroom related predicaments.
Unless You're Living It
Sarah Bliss, 9min, USA, 16mm
An edgy, unsettling portrait of place and power in rural white Ontario that challenges the correlation between seeing and knowing, and the ravages of late-stage capitalism. Hand processing, contact printing, tinting and toning engage the film as a body that, like the residents of Mt. Forest, sustains injuries, wounds and burdens, but also has the capacity for delight, revelatory pleasure, and transformation.
Armie
Mark Cira, 5min, Canada, 16mm
Based on the short story "Armie" by seventeen-year-old writer Wendii McIver, this short experimental film captures the life of its lead character Maë, spanning her childhood. As she grows up, a bright star by the name of Armie watches over her. Little does she know that Armie may signal the end of the world.
Bennifer
Ryan McGlade, 13min, USA, 16mm
Jed's family isn't how he remembered it.
Life After Love
Zachary Epcar, 9min, USA, 16mm
A shifting in the light of the lot, where parked cars become containers for a collective estrangement.
Astrology
Brittany Gravely, 3min, USA, 16mm
An ancient artifact, an alchemical algorithm, astrological archaeology.
The Air of the Earth in Your Lungs
Ross Meckfessel, 11min, Japan/USA, 16mm
Drones and GoPros survey the land while users roam digital forests, oceans, and lakes. Those clouds look compressed. That tree looks pixelated. A landscape film for the 21st century.
Gone Sale
Matt Meindl, 5min, USA, Super 8
Faceless forms inhabit the shadow-sprayed remnants of an electronic shopping mall board game. Slumber party capitalism, now a bargain bin of lost dreams.
See Weeds
Dawn George, 3min, Canada, Super 8/16mm
An examination of three weeds - dandelion, coltsfoot, and goldenrod and each weed’s direct effects on film stock, via hand-processing with eco-processing techniques. The three weeds were first shot on Super 8mm film and hand processed in caffenol. Each roll of film was then transferred, via optical printer, to 16mm stock and then hand-developed in its own respective “weedol.” Each roll of 16mm film was then stained with either a dandelion, coltsfoot, or a goldenrod “tea.” The results not only reveal the visual characteristic of each plant but also the filmic qualities that each plant imparts on the film stock.
21st Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival - Day Three @ 9:00pm
- Details
- Category: Annual Moviate Underground Film Festival at Artsfest!
DATE: Sunday, May 26th @ 9:00pm
VENUE: Midtown Cinema
FLESH CITY A New Feature by Thorsten Fleisch
Plus bonus short films: 720 Deal & Skjemt Blod
Description:
FLESH CITY is a hostile place but it has great clubs... where not only beats are pulsating. In one of these dance temples, located at an abandoned industrial site, Vyren hooks up with Loquette. They explore the underbelly of the venue and fall into the trap of Prof. Yagov, the resident mad scientist who preys on lost and drugged out fashion victims.
As he introduces them to mutation and mayhem the whole city gets infected.
Soon everybody in FLESH CITY will be connected... via flesh link. FLESH CITY is a Trojan horse of a film. It starts as a genre movie but slowly derails into manipulating the audience's mind. You come to realize that you yourself are the real victim of the film's mysterious mad scientist character. After the visually intense finale one can only wonder as to what extent your brain has been altered and for what purpose. It's hard to shake off the feeling of having been brainwashed.”
Showing with Short Films:
720 Deal
A film by Gary Adlestein & Jerry Orr
Skjemt Blod
A Film by Gwenmarie White
In her CalArts thesis, SKJEMT BLOD (which translates to “bad blood” or “tainted blood” in Norwegian), Gwenmarie White uses what she has coined “girl kvlture” as a vehicle for meditation on American brutality. The orchestral black metal adaptation of Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” takes advantage of the tension between the sounds and images of pop culture and metal culture to call attention to larger aspects of violence and pleasure. “My goal is to always straddle the line between critique and complicity,” says White, “because it is a critique…but it’s also a love letter.” The line in SKJEMT BLOD is always moving, digging stubbornly and disturbingly deeper into tropes and stereotypes rather than dismantling them. Suburban whiteness rears its ugly (but also, like, really, really
pretty) head, proving that “trve” brutality takes many forms, and moves with an insidious ease throughout the institutions of late-stage capitalism.