Wanderlust West: Expanded cinema performance

Wanderlust West: Expanded cinema performance
triple 16mm and super 8 mm film projections and live music by Orquesta del Perdido
Jan 28. 2018
International Film festival Rotterdam
stills by Ernst van Deursen

the movement 'West'

'Western Wild...how I found wanderlust and met Old Shatterhand' is about my mythical space and the mythical space that Karl May created and his 'followers' followed as a way towards a resolution to the violence or oppression they experienced in their society. The story of the West is a shared historical terrain of ideas about heritage, geography and the artists place in all of this. The American West was an idea that Karl May formed in his imagination; that became a place through the production television shows,Spaghetti Westerns and American Westerns. I am a descendant of the Western edge of the European continent (Ireland and Scotland) and my early relatives in the 1600’s, moved to the hinterlands of North America. This movement became a main directional thrust or theme of the idea of America and came to represent the idea of freedom; the movement West. The film is about movement both as a topic and contains the concept of it within its structure. It reflects a free mind at play, it is an essay, a documentary and an animation.