I like to think of Easter Everywhere<\/em> as a still life\u2009\u2014\u2009one that is, ironically, stretched into the decidedly un-still mediums of video and music. Sill life with film noir, Justice, Rock Talk<\/em> and Easter Everywhere<\/em>: a movement-toward the (unimaginably) still, a teeming stilling, a memento mori<\/em> for utopian yearnings. Emanating past and future tenses, the film speaks of before-the-revolution and after-the-apocalypse, bracketing out an indeterminate plane of enquiry: an unknowable surface-like present, a palimpsestic, \u00adendless cohabitation of plots and visuals which verges on their co-erasure. The narrative\u2019s braided threads don\u2019t add up to a clear structure but, rather, exist as a pile, a heap of possible constellations. Images are layered to the point where they verge on pure texture. This heaping structure enacts decay on the tissue samples of plots, characters, quotes, and images, \u00adinviting allegorical engagement with the work and its characters (as well as the \u201csilent character\u201d of the filmmaker, the one who has layered).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The characters (and particularly, the Man, whose plot-thread \u00adverges on a Beckett-like post-apocalyptic waiting game) emit a prosthetic field, which binds together portions of the layers. The Man is propped up on all sides by the overly symbolic images that surround and overwrite him\u2009\u2014\u2009candles, microphones and shuffled papers, film-noir skulls. His lifelessness, narcissism and repetitiveness suck these objects in and he leans heavily on them, acting allegorically as a still-life object, enacting both the fluidity of the boundaries between subject and object and his reification as lonely, post-social being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Easter Everywhere<\/em> emits a field of ambivalence about utopian desires and their decay\u2009\u2014\u2009a fondness for the quaint yearnings of generations past, and the quirks of those whose characters have been fashioned in \u00adrelation to long-gone styles of hopefulness; a sincere wish to reconnect with now unfathomable social aims oscillating with the completely deflated \u00adhopelessness of being trapped within one\u2019s own interpellations of capitalism as alienation-machine. (In a sense, this work locates the deathbed of the social within character: as the weightiness of individuals\u2019 passive \u00adrepetitions of reification that both constitute and colour the self-\u00adperception of subjectivity within capitalism.) It also, I believe, enacts ambivalence about its own efficacy as a medium and a methodology for opening up a politics of hope, for locating the possibility of finding another type of futurity. This ambivalence is akin to that of many seventeenth-century Dutch still-life paintings. Operating within the world\u2019s first permanently affluent surplus society, in which individual households regulated surplus by accumulating luxuries, these paintings embodied the contradiction between, on the one hand, warning against an overinvestment in material wealth and, on the other, presenting themselves as sumptuous, indulgent objects of exchange.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - For a discussion of this tension in Dutch still life, see Norman Bryson\u2019s essay \u201cAbundance,\u201d Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still-Life Painting <\/em>(London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 96-135, 115-21.<\/span> With like ambivalence, Jeremy\u2019s film, as it were, yearns for utopia by throwing it in the trash. However, as Norman Bryson points out, this sort of paradoxical construction is not necessarily a flaw; it can be a site of rich rhetorical complexity. It provokes an oscillation, calling into question the way a viewing subject\u2009\u2014\u2009here hailed as a field of ambivalences and excesses\u2009\u2014\u2009faces the complex relations between being and professing, seeing and understanding. In the face of this memento mori<\/em>, this heaping pile of decayed textures-images-plots, one has, after a period of searching, the sensation that one can construct a comprehension very different from the appearance of the presented narratives. We can cleave, overwrite, infuse the allegory, pick out the sparks that sear between some of the images\u2009\u2014\u2009these sparks that are the very stuff of creating and anticipating, without encoding, an unknowable futurity. The \u201cfuture\u201d the film literally depicts is a farce, a fear, a foil\u2009\u2014\u2009a red herring clothing this other kind of facing-toward. The film wants us to recognize the resonance between its depicted dystopic future and futurity in itself, a potential which, here, lies in the space between the layers of an allegory.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/69_AC04_Rosamond_JTodd_Easter-Everywhere-3-edited-scaled.jpg\")
Easter Everywhere<\/em>, 2008-2009.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Video Out Distribution<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/69_AC04_Rosamond_JTodd_Easter-Everywhere-2-scaled.jpg\")
Easter Everywhere<\/em>, 2008-2009.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Video Out Distribution<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n