Paradiso

Paradiso is constructed entirely out of junk food and pleasant, relaxing music. Nothing in paradise needs to have nutritional value. The only requirement is pleasure. In my best Monty Python accent a voiceover posits the question “was Jesus ever truly happy?” as gummy bears and chicklets dance on the screen in what critic Fred Camper calls a “half ironic vision of redemption.” Paradiso is the final section of my three-part Material Excess (73 min, 2002-03). Material Excess is a large-scale animated movie, which borrows its structure from Dante’s The Divine Comedy. The animation is for the most part created in a digital process related to the cameraless hand-made film tradition. In a photo-editing program, scans of various objects are placed on a digital image strip without regard for individual frames. These images are translated into video sequences and the result is an exploding jumble of colors and forms. By its very nature, the animation cannot directly illustrate the various bits of narration that appear in the soundtrack. The two things simply happen simultaneously. –Gregg Biermann