Hymn of Reckoning

In an interview I did earlier this year for the Milan Game Video/Art exhibition, I deflected a question about the connection between Hymn of Reckoning and Reckoning 3, discouraging the idea that there was much of a link between the two videos, apart from their names and their use of video game material. Now that I’ve thought about it more, I can tease out more connections. Both pieces were more ambitious and laborious than work I’d made before, and with both I attempted to critically engage with media products I’d willingly consumed (as opposed to found by chance or at a day-job). Both feature recognizable Hollywood actors (as opposed to obscure or unknown performers). For both, I recorded synthesizer figures and chords to provide connective tissue between sequences.

I made Hymn of Reckoning in direct response to the torture plots of Bush/Cheney-era television entertainments, plots that provided insidious support for the architects of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the like. I’d shot Julie Christie sobbing in Afterglow off of my TV in Brooklyn in the summer of 2001, and in the months after 9/11 I’d tie that clip in my mind with Tom Cruise sniff-hyperventilating in Magnolia. I thought I’d try to make an unbearable clip reel of actors sobbing hysterically, an expression of the grotesque, compounding sorrow of those months and years, the sorrow that was never as viscerally present in public discourse as I thought it should be, a sorrow that of course continues on and on. I avoided the sobbing clip reel project until the winter of 2005-6, when Hymn of Reckoning was a feverish obsession and I needed a sequence to close it out.

“The masterful Hymn of Reckoning (2006) combines images from old computer games and Lost to create a carefully calculated age-of-terror mental maelstrom.”

— Ed Halter, “Recycle It,” Moving Image Source, July 2008

This video is part of the Oto Trilogy and is also available on Kent Lambert Videoworks: Volume 1