Video collage, rasperry screens, headphones, styrofoam boxes, peepholes.
Engaging with the depiction of food, appetite, microbes, infection, and sexuality in film, Corpse Happy: Easily Rotting, Easily Aroused is a three-part video collage, setting different image-regimes and and modalities of consumption into conversation with each other. The video works’ red thread is a short black and white film called Cheese Mites (1902). This short film, part of the Unseen World series by Charles Urban, brought the microscopic world to the screen for the first time. Professor Martin Duncan is filmed during a staged lunchtime break. While looking through his magnifying glasses, he discovers, in shock, the crawling cheese mites on his lunch. The mites on Duncan’s cheese are shown as large-as-crab bugs, wandering about the nation’s favorite lunchtime snack, to the joyful disgust of the audiences. While Unseen World was celebrated as an apparent first educational scientific contribution to cinematic culture, Cheese Mites, as the spectacle of the series, reportedly became the first movie to ever be banned in the U.K., for fear it would hurt cheese sales.
Part I: Filthy&Inedible, 25min 42s
Cheese Mites (1902) by Charles Urban
Ticket of No Return (1979) by Ulricke Ottinger
Rasperry Reich (2004) by Bruce La Bruce
Strange Culture (2007) by Lynn Hershma-Leeson
A Brief History of Paradise as told by the Cockroaches (2002) by Joshua Oppenheimer
PartII: Rancid&Stale, 26min 41s
Zap! The Weapon is Food (1976) by Richard Marquand
Cheese Mites (1902) by Charles Urban
The Coca-Cola Kid (1985) by Dušan Makavejev
La Grande Bouffe (1973) by Marco Ferreri
The Challenge of Manufacturing (1996) by Joshua Oppenheimer
Part III: Spoiled&Rotten, 27min 53s
Cheese Mites (1902) by Charles Urban
American Stories: Food, Family and Philosophy (1989) by Chantal Akerman
Daisies (1966) by Vera Chytilová
Viridiana (1961) by Luis Buñuel
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & her Lover (1989) by Peter Greenaway
Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968) by Joyce Wieland