EMPIRE II (LE RETOUR)

of CONNANSKI Loïc

FRANCE, 2001, 00:31:00

Production : CONNANSKI Loïc
Genre : Video art
Keyword : Communication, Irony, Society, Television

Summary :
The TV is even worse than usual today. A double origin : - Summer of 1964 : in the middle of the Cold War, Andy Warhol entitles “EMPIRE” an eight-hour fixed shot of the Empire State Building. - August 2nd, 1914 : Franz Kafka sums up his day in his diary : “Germany has declared war on Russia. Afternoon at the swimming pool.” It is the beginning of the end for the Austrian-Hungarian empire. Empire II : THE RETURN is universal history or macro-history September 11th, 2001 : an idle man is alone in his apartment and decides to make coffee to escape his agonizing void. He obsessively concentrates on each of his gestures to avoid thinking of the emptiness of his life. In his narcissism, he loftily ignores the images that his TV repeatedly broadcasts : a plane crashes again and again and again into the World Trade Center, which crumbles down again and again and again. The cross cutting of the film draws a parallel between the Kafkaesque hero’s train of thought, as he repeats his daily gestures to the point of nonsense, in order to get away from the emptiness of his existence, and the very “warholian” fascination of the media, which endlessly repeat those images of chaos to escape the absolute lack of information. Certain shots of the hero preparing his coffee and his monologue are repeated ad nauseam to show his alienation (comic-tragic effect). The goal is to show that on September 11th, 2001, what was braodcast on all the TV channels of the world wasn’t information any more, but a genuine fiction that sought to give pleasure to the viewer through his fear of chaos. (Loïc Connanski)

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