Sucari's video is a succession of images from Spanish TV news, commercials, a documentary about Spain's turbulent history, film material about industrialization and fragments from the films 'Death in Venice' by Luchino Visconti and 'Frankenstein' by James Whale. Sucari begins and ends however, with a piece from a German documentary: a replication of the most famous experiment by the Russian film director and theorist, Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970). With this experiment, the so-called 'Kuleshov Effect', Kuleshov revealed in the twenties the role of editing in producing the meaning of a story. He demonstrated that two images edited together are not interpreted separately by the audience, but according to the comparison A+B=C, where C is the interpretation of these images that does not appear in the sequence. Inspired by this, Sucari tries to show how "history is written" in contemporary society by the mass media. So we see, successively, an image of an older man getting down on his knees with a bewildered expression on his face, a uniformed body lying in a coffin with decorations, veiled, grieving women and a clearly depressed Juan Carlos in the khaki uniform of the Spanish franquistas. On closer inspection though, the images appear dubious when we realize that the coffin beside the two women is closed, and smaller than the coffin in the previous fragment. Slowly it dawns on us that the expressions on the faces of the new king and the older man don't necessarily exhibit sadness at the death of General Franco. Sucari strikingly shows how, through selection and arrangement, the media – regardless of which group controls them – can manipulate the interpretation of images and bring us an artificial view of reality and history.
– Teddi Dols
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Voice: Xavier Theros
Production: Jacobo Sucari, Ina Dunkel
Jacobo Sucari, 1950, Buenos Aires (Argentina)
Lives and works in Barcelona (Spain)
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