Pauline Shongov, PhD Candidate, Film and Visual Studies
Location: Zoom (RSVP for link)
CMP Capstone Committee:
Lucien Castaing-Taylor
John Cowles Professor of Art and Anthropology
Tom Conley
Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies
Mirage (15 min)
Two Bulgarian pensioners embark on their first road trip through the American Southwest. Once confined by the borders of the Eastern Bloc, they now venture into the familiar landscape of the Western film genre. Throughout their travels, memories of the past seep into their experience of the present—a landscape of the West that, for over thirty-five years, they have dreamed to see beyond the frame of the TV screen. Now limited in movement by their own aging bodies, they are confined by yet another screen. The window becomes a portal for slow cinema, where the landscape of the West unravels in real time as the distant promise it once held is colored by the allusive, newfound form of its mirage.
Working with the transnational genre of the Western, the film constitutes part of a larger body of work on the afterlives of second-world modernities, the contested heritage left behind by those transitional economies, and the lives of people caught up in this long durée. This expanded artistic research practice engages, more broadly, with the image of the Balkans as a region that sits between the competing pulls of the East and the West; wrestles with the incomplete archives of the 20th century; and speaks to the contemporary state of global uncertainty in the age of extraction.
