Paradiso

United States

2003

23 Min

Color

English

Currently 2.8/5 Stars.
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DIR Gregg Biermann

Synopsis

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

Director

Gregg Biermann

My work comes out of the avant-garde tradition of film as visual art. Avant-garde cinema is an important and relatively young artistic project. While it maintains its scrappy integrity, and while many significant works have been created in subsequent decades, current practitioners have not fully moved out of the shadow of the prodigious 1960’s and 70’s. Consequently I’ve looked to new technologies to discover vast unspoiled frontiers no longer available to small gauge filmmakers looking to explore cinematic form. The development of new instruments has often determined the important aesthetic developments in artistic and musical composition. The meaning of digital technology lies in its ability to copy, but also in its plasticity. Its capacity to alter, mask, fragment, re-mix, super-impose, mutate, reflect, transmit and reframe are its prime currents. –Canyon Cinema