New Museum Triennial "4000 Shots"

Over the weekend I checked out the New Museum Triennial, where I saw a film by emerging artist Jonathas de Andrade, born 1982 in Brazil.  The piece, “4,000 shots” (2010) is shot in super 8, and repeats in a 60 minute loop.  It shows anonymous male faces captured on the streets of Buenos Aires, a different one in each frame.  The pacing of the work is quite dramatic; there is a rapidness to the images accompanied by an urgent pacing rhythm which periodically slows down to an electronic drone when the image gets paused. The piece arouses the anxiety and excitement of watching a roulette wheel, with faces instead of numbers spinning around in circles until the device randomly lands on one of them. 

The movement mimics the quality of a racing memory, each image is imprinted on the mind for just a flicker, and then the previous image is immediately erased and replaced with another equally fleeting image.  Each shot varies, each of the portraits appears casual and incidental, as if almost taken by accident, or lifted from security tape footage.  The subjects have the look of strangers accidentally caught in the background of a snapshot, however they are the main and only subject of the shots.  The figures look removed, to quote Stephen Malkmus, they look as if they’ve been chosen as an extra in the movie adaption of the sequel to their life.  This quality speaks to the historical amnesia Andrade intends to address.  Andrade writes that the project developed during the course of his travels between six different countries in South America, an experience which ultimately lead him to reflect on issues of memory and history in Latin America—which he characterizes as a place that is “at once whole and interrupted, a place I’m apart of without belonging.”