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Motorist

Chip Lord

1989 01:09:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo3/4" U-matic video
Tags:
Expedition/Travel, Found Footage, Landscape

Description

Since his early days in Ant Farm, Lord’s evocation of the automobile has been the car as avatar, as the spirit of America—that consummate combination of superior organized corporate technology and the pioneering triumph of the willful individual driver. Motorist is a 69-minute road picture in which the camera rides shotgun with TV actor Richard Marcus as he plays a drifting driver. Intercutting scenes of Marcus with clips of industrial films and commercials of the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, Motorist pinpoints the patriotic heroics and futuristic fantasies of Ford and General Motors, unleashing the pure romanticism of American automophilia at its most ecstatic heights.

Chip Lord has worked with video since 1971, first as a partner in the alternative media collective Ant Farm, and since 1978 as an independent artist/producer. With Ant Farm, he produced and co-directed the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame. His early work draws on documentary conventions, but during the '80s he moved toward experimental narrative with Easy Living, Ballplayer, and his first feature-length tape, Motorist. His more recent works return to non-fiction with the video essay The Aroma of Enchantment (1992), and Awakening from the 20th Century (1999). He produces video installations as well as single-channel tapes, and he is a Professor in the Department of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.