Steve Reinke The
Hundred Videos
Finished well ahead of schedule, The Hundred Videos, is a remarkable project that comprises five hours of material and can be viewed in two very different London locations, at the Peer office in the East End and at Soho House, in the heart of the West End. The shortest videos last less than a minute and the longest, just over ten. They are not linked by an overall or linear narrative, so instead they can be browsed, dipped into or revisited a number of times. At the core of Reinke's project is a fascination with the artifice of manufactured truths. He knows that anything he presents as real must always ultimately be fiction. This is sometimes explored in a humorous or a tragicomic way, such as the video about Dr. Asselbergs' "important Canadian invention" of the instant mashed potato flake. And sometimes we are witness to an almost excruciating pathos, as in his love letter to Corey, the good looking young bowling champ who is the object of his obsessional adoration.
Much
of the work is about desire and the need for fulfilment, both sexual and
intellectual. But like accepting the impossibility of representing the
real, desire, too, is frustrated. The confessional quality of the work
is sometimes unsettling and sometimes downright confrontational. The raw
honesty of the confession is often used in documentary making. But by
incorporating various other genres, the quasi-scientific, the home movie
or homoerotic pornography, Reinke sets out to play with the authority
of filmmaking as a whole and documentary in particular. |
