June 1–30, 2023
e-flux Film is very pleased to present two films by Jesse McLean, Just Like Us (2013, 15 minutes) and Wherever You Go, There We Are (2017, 12 minutes), as the June 2023 edition of our monthly series Staff Picks.
In Just Like Us, a banal and familiar landscape comprised of box stores and parking lots proves a rich site for longing, intimacy, and radical change. Celebrities are observed in this environment and are reduced to ordinary beings in the process. An enigmatic protagonist reveals little moments of subjectivity that escape into the piece like a contaminant, rupturing the view and evidencing the paradox of connection and belonging within systems that simultaneously contain us and comprise us.
In the experimental travelogue Wherever You Go, There We Are, efforts to sound human and look natural instead become artificial. The scenery is provided through photo-chromed vintage postcards, displaying not only scenic North American landscapes but also the rise of infrastructure and industry. Aspiring to look more realistic by adding color to a black and white image, the postcards (already a vulnerable method of correspondence caught between private and public) are instead documents of the fantastic. The road trip is narrated by an automated correspondent (all dialogue is taken from spam emails) who is both seductive and mercurial, his entreaties becoming increasingly foreboding and obtuse, in a relentless effort to capture our attention.
Watch the films here.
Jesse McLean has dedicated her creative research and art practice to exploring what it is to be human in relation to what is not. Her films reveal the deep intimacies and connections formed through these relationships and contrast the finite capacities of the nonhuman with infinite human desires. She has presented her work at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide, including the CPH:DOX in Copenhagen; New York Film Festival, NY, NY; International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands; Venice Film Festival, Italy; Kassel Dokfest, Germany; Impakt Festival, Netherlands; First Look Festival, NY, NY; Imagine Science Film Festival, NY, NY; Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Switzerland; Yebizo Festival of Art + Alternative Visions, Tokyo, Japan; EXiS, Seoul, S. Korea; Mumok in Vienna, Austria; and Green Gallery, Milwaukee. She was the recipient of an International Critics Prize, (FIPRESCI Prize) at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, and a Jury Prize in the International Competition at the 2013 Videoex Festival in Switzerland. She was a featured artist at the 2014 Flaherty Seminar and a MacDowell Fellow in 2016. In 2016 she was selected for a Mary L. Nohl Individual Artist Fellowship and was a fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres within the Peck School of the Arts and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, one of the leading film programs devoted to supporting cinematic arts in the US.
About the series
Staff Picks is a monthly streaming series on e-flux Film of staff picks and recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.