Underskog

A counter-blast ( and back-handed homage) to grim conceptualists and dry theorists, this months artists use wit as a strategy and humour as a weapon.
Freud established that jokes were structurally akin to dreams in their use of condensation, displacement, representation by opposites, punning and ‘nonsense’. See it all here, and split your sides!

Ghosts Before Breakfast Hans Richter ( DE /1928 / 16 mm / 7 mins)
A Richter film of pure Dada; outrage and humor without limits. Hats, collars, drums, streetlights, fire hoses or the hands of dolls that are dislocated, targets, scales, are as vivid as branches, mice or eyes … Fantasies mobilize the “inanimate object” and make it the main character.

On The Marriage Broker Joke As Cited By Sigmund Freud In Wit And Its Relation To The Unconscious, Or Can The Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed?
Owen Land
(USA /1980 / 16mm / 
17 mins )
ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE harks back to Bunuel’s early work. Not only is it structured like a dream and filled with sexual imagery, its an insider’s joke played upon the avant-garde. Bunuel used the insights of psychoanalysis to satirize Christianity; Land – with an almost equal perversity – reverses the process and uses Christianity to send up Freud.

Klipperty Klopp Andrew Kotting (UK / 1984 / super 8 to video / 12 mins)
It’s the sun, my son! Le soeil! Le soleil!
Kotting’s myth created on this filthy earth, in glorious Super 8 , its like Joseph Beuys on acid.

I Love You Sarah Miles (UK / 1991 / 16mm/ 1min)
A fugitive feminist in fur.
In her tragicomic fable the stereotypic bunny girl struggles for supremacy with the anarchic hare symbol of enlightenment and incarnation.

Worst Case Scenario John Smith ( UK / 2004 / video / 18 mins )
A series of still photographs depicting daily life on a Viennese street corner. The film re-orders and manipulates these images, and the static world slowly and subtly comes to life. Sigmund Freud casts his long shadow across the city, and an increasingly improbable chain of events and relationships starts to emerge.