Dramatically Repeating Lawrence of Arabia is a re-edit of David Lean’s 217-minute orientalist “classic” Lawrence of Arabia into a 15-minute hallucination of repeating masculinized poses, costumes and dramatic gestures. An algorithmic structure condenses and frame-by-frame remixes the original film into a cycling of divergence, convergence and momentary mirrorings. Stripped of narrational logic and image stability and combined with a re-mix of Maurice Jarre’s “Overture from Lawrence of Arabia,” Dramatically Repeating Lawrence of Arabia transforms a Hollywood representation of heroic colonialist history into an affect of melancholy.
Dramatically Repeating Lawrence of Arabia
Les LeVeque
2004 00:14:43 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Description
About Les LeVeque
Les LeVeque is an artist who works with digital and analog electronic technology. His projects include single and multi-channel videos and video/computer-based installations. His projects have been exhibited and screened internationally. His work is also represented by Kerry Schuss Gallery in New York City.
"In the work of Les LeVeque we encounter insights born — not only the formal strategies deployed, (condensation, expansion, reversal, mirroring...) — but of the ecstatic destruction of the reified "realities" of the consciousness industries, the purveyors of the spectacle. They remind us — and even now we are in need of that reminder — that these "realities," presented as eternal, are in fact shallow pliable, not fixed. They are subject to investigation; they may be reconfigured as games in which we are in control, where the terrors and seductions to which they subject us in their unilateral discourse may be altered according to our will, for our pleasure and amusement, for our provocation, for increasing our understanding of the machines of consciousness that process us. They are important viewing, and they are considerable achievements. They remind us that the insights and efforts of a single individual can be deployed via computational means to wreak havoc with the massively and expensively constructed tissue of lies that envelope us. And just as important: they are smart and they are fun."
— Keith Sandborn, January 15th, 2010