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The Eddies

Angelo Madsen

2018 00:16:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video

Description

​From below ground, a man named Eddie describes flood lines, levees and trivial histories of the crumbling infrastructure of Memphis, TN. In this same city, the filmmaker, a recent transsexual transplant, watches military propaganda and contemplates masculine connectivity as he attempts to integrate into the American South. He posts a Craigslist ad asking men to masturbate on-camera with their firearms. He receives a single response from a man whose name is also Eddie.
 
Paced, static images of Mississippi River currents, freight trains and decaying architecture mark the above-ground landscape of Memphis, while shaky, handheld darkness, with flickers of light, depict glimpses of the city's underground tunnels. The encounter between the filmmaker and "Eddie No. 2" is revealed on camera, explicitly. The underground world becomes a lens through which the challenges of the above-ground world can be reconsidered.

 

About Angelo Madsen

Angelo Madsen (previously known as Madsen Minax or Angelo Madsen Minax 2005-2024) is a multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator. His projects consider how human relationships are woven through personal and collective histories, cultures, and kinships, with specific attention to subcultural experience, phenomenology, and the politics of desire.

Madsen's works have shown at Berlinale, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, BAM CinemaFest, Art of the Real at Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, British Film Institute, and dozens of LGBT and experimental film festivals around the world. He is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Sundance Film Institute, BAVC Media, New York State Council on the Arts, the Warhol Foundation, LEF Foundation, and has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Yaddo, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and others. His film, North By Current (2021), aired on season 34 of POV (PBS), was nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and won the Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight award, Best Writing award from the IDA and numerous festival jury prizes. A New York Times Critics Pick, North By Current has been called "A beautiful, complex wonder of a film," by Rolling Stone and "A titanic work" by Criterion. Madsen is currently an Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont, a current USA Artists Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.