This Narrative is Killing Me

A story is hope in motion, optimism in action.

When we are unhappy, stories become inert. This Narrative is Killing Me developed out of my initial reluctance to use appropriated or borrowed material (from other films, videos, television, etc.) in my video art projects. While appropriation’s intention is generally to subvert a political or moral message, the people who inadvertently appear in these borrowed clips are no longer complicit in this “new” message.

Almost as a challenge to myself, I set out to create a story which was largely made up of fragments from film history and film language. But rather than blatantly subverting the meaning of these stolen clips, I primarily wanted to use them the way they were initially intended, but to put them in a slightly different context. To create a kind of master-narrative, where everyone did what he or she did in the original movie, except now they were doing it in MY movie. Establishing shots, cutaways and reaction shots would continue to serve their initial purpose.

On the surface, This Narrative is Killing Me appears to be a work about editing, but it is in fact the least significant part of it. Editing was easy. Finding an appropriate clip to continue the narrative was extremely difficult, often taking days or weeks. I literally watched hundreds of films, many of them in fast-forward, looking for something as mundane as a woman walking into a restaurant, or a man falling down. Once I found it I just plopped it into its pre-determined spot.

The character who forms the “foreground” of this master narrative is essentially an unhappy man who goes on a journey back towards happiness. To do so, he travels through a historical and genre time shift, back and forth with apparent abandon.

I think this is something we are asked to do every day; to process disparate, incomplete and increasingly overwhelming information.

Our mental health is determined by how long we can keep up.

- Dennis Day 2004