Fashionably Late For The Relationship
performance and film with Lián Amaris, 2007-2008
Fashionably Late For The Relationship is feature-length film created from the documentation of a 72-hour performance that took place in Union Square in the summer of 2007. The piece was created in collaboration with performance artist Lián Amaris Sifuentes, who spent three days in a boudoir on a traffic island preparing for a night on the town in slow motion and in full public view.
I directed a thirty-person film crew over the three days, panoptically documenting the performance using four high-definition video cameras. The performance documentation was then accelerated to sixty-speed and edited into a 72 minute long film, using a combination of custom video blending software and commercial editing tools. I then composed a score for the film in collaboration with violinist Todd Reynolds.
In the film, everything the performer does that takes an hour translates into a minute of the film, resulting in a strange effect where the performer seems to be moving at an exaggerated, albeit normal, pace while the entire city flies by around her. The piece was filmed and edited according to a shooting script that meditates on different situations and viewpoints in obsessive love, making the resulting two-part work a comment on romance, gender relations, temporality, and public and private gaze.
Sifuentes’ performance was open to the public and the project received front-page coverage in the New York Times. The film premiered at the 2008 01 Festival in San Jose, California, and has since been shown in film festivals worldwide, as well as in a public projection with the Big Screen Project in New York City.
