SFCINEMATHEQUE

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Thursday, November 20, 2003

A Prank Without a Theory is Merely a Hoax: An Eric Saks Retrospective

Program 2: Forevermore, Biography of a Leach Lord

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts





This highly original “cutting attack on American greed from the ’50s through the ’80s and beyond” (Michael Wilmington, Los Angeles Times) is a chilling pseudo-documentary about the culture of waste-brokering from “arguably the most cynical media artist on the West (or any) Coast today” (Bay Area filmmaker Craig Baldwin). Forevermore is a meditative narrative about the legacy of toxic-waste dumping in the American landscape and psyche. The film takes a freeform, diaristic approach, combining dreams, memories, scientific documentation and visions in a revealing method of truth-telling that, in 1989, presaged the current vogue of post-objective documentaries and narrative reenactments. The film also predicts, and laments, the failure of US Federal EPA initiatives like SUPERFUND and RCRA, exposing them as yet more euphemisms destroyed by corporate politics. (Konrad Steiner)