Marco Brambilla at Henry Urbach architecture - New York - Brief Article

Marco Brambilla made his first film in Toronto at 16, worked in commercial and feature films in Los Angeles and New York and, since 1998, has focused on video and photography projects in New York. His show of three new video works, ambiguously titled "In Action," presented the short subject as spectacle and homage. The stunt motorcyclist hero of his black-and-white video Wall of Death (2001) relentlessly dares the crash-and-burn of his trade in an assault on the frontier of centrifugal force. In the two minutes and 37 seconds of its heart-stopping duration, Brambilla cuts from one point of view to another as the wall rider races around the sides of a large wooden barrel. A carnival offshoot of board track racing, banned in the United States after a deadly pileup in 1912, the event today enjoys a revival fueled by the rise of interest in extreme sports. Brambilla's project was shot in Britain.

In the establishing shot, the camera cruises the wooden track. The rider, gathering velocity, held to the track by centrifugal force, repeatedly raises his arms to salute the blur of spectators ringing the track, then lowers them, folding his hands behind his back. The camera shifts to the spectators, then back to the rider spinning in the carnival drum. The rider cries out in exultation, arms up in triumph. In this work, acknowledging the history of avant-garde cinema, Brambilla joins the graphic concerns of formalist film to the romance of lyrical film. At the same time, he visually references the zoetrope, also known as the Wheel of Life, a 19th-century device that created an illusion of motion through a sequence of images on a spinning drum. Wall of Death was projected in a discrete space with an audio track of motorcycle machinery noise, a high-pitched click and an ambient moment of epiphany. There was a brief pause between replays.

In the less than three minutes of Sequel, Brambilla again employs the vocabulary of avant-garde film with a stroboscopic "flicker" and a projected image of burning celluloid. The recumbent nude Sylvester Stallone as the post-apocalyptic John Spartan in Demolition Man, Brambilla's 1993 debut feature film for Warner Bros., is accompanied here by an audio sampling from the introduction of George Lucas's debut feature, the bleakly futuristic THX 1138, an industry standard for anticipatory sound. In Equilibrium (2001), projected with no audio in an adjacent hallway, a solitary, suited businessman bounces from an unseen trampoline into the video's frame, his back to the camera, arms gesturing to a spinning urban panorama. Almost free from gravity's constraints, caught in an endless limbo of tall buildings, he recalls the figures of Robert Longo's "Men in the City" series and, perhaps, Clark Kent.

The galleries echoed with the audio tracks of Sequel and Waft of Death, rising and falling like a white-noise roar of ambient tinnitus for airports. With their preoccupation with high risk as entertainment, alienation, and entropy, Brambilla's projections offered the stunned viewer a self-referential examination of the decline and fall of Western culture.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group