Fear is a virus. 2020. Digital video, color, sound, 5 minutes 7 seconds. Soundtrack: Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker, 1979.
“Finally, it was the city that held us, the city they said had no center, that all of us had come to from all over America because this was the place to find dreams and pleasure and love. I noticed—looking at headlines—that some cities emptied and some didn’t. Ours didn’t, not completely.”
–Carolyn See, Golden Days (1986)
This experimental film originated out of a personal response to the alienated environment and unsettling temporality suddenly imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. A female character, visibly absent of digital technology except for the camera into which she gazes, explores the empty ruins of a beachside theme park, in normal times a site of pleasure and indulgence, in Santa Cruz, California. The relationship between psychology and ecology is explored through themes of isolation, observation, passivity, and immobility.
The film complicates the performance of everyday life and vanity in times of apocalypse. Employing an aesthetic of sublime contamination, the film questions our contemporary, social media-obsessed society. What does decoration with make-up and jewels mean when no one will see you? What is the future of luxury in a world that no longer has fashion runways or hotels? What happens to new life?