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The Elektra/Vampyr Variations

Edward Rankus

2009 00:28:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video

Description

A fantasia that makes twisted use of elements from the Elektra myth and vampire stories. Imagine a woman listening to Richard Strauss's Elektra while watching Carl Dryer's Vampyr and the dream she might then have that night. The protagonist imagines herself as Elektra. She has an unhealthy obsession over her dead father Agamemnon. She also passionately despises her mother Clytemnestra, as she is the one who murdered her father. Elektra exhumes the ax used to kill her father in his bath. She wishes to now kill her mother with the same ax, perhaps with help from her brother Orest. There is also an antagonistic trickster character present, often dressed like a gypsy, who has a malicious sense of humor. To add to the Elektra character's despair, the gypsy tells her scary vampire stories. A young woman in drag plays the multiple roles of dead father, brother, and lover. This work has a dream-logic where motifs and symbols are constantly shifting and melting.

Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.

About Edward Rankus

Edward Rankus is an independent video artist whose work references the symbolic systems of science-fiction films, behavioral psychology experiments, sub-atomic particle physics, Spanish mysticism, and Zen Buddhism. Concerned with the hazy borderline between inner and outer worlds, his work invokes a surrealist/expressionist aesthetic. As a student of Dan Sandin and the late Phil Morton, Rankus is part of the second generation of Chicago video artists whose approach to video differed from their more process-oriented teachers. Rankus's work is masterfully edited and deeply ironic, and he is able to wring drama from mundane subjects. The play of symbols is very important in Rankus's work, which in some ways approaches still-life painting in its juxtapositioning of essential elements to create moods and meanings. Rankus layers various cultural symbols and builds on viewer expectations to question the arbitrary conventional boundaries of "reality" and "self."

"These tapes visually investigate perennial themes of impermanence, the disillusion and mortality of one's body--often using simple objects as stand-ins for that body."
--Ed Rankus