THE MACKEYS

Experimental Film
  • Video Bureau Archive 14: Stephan Lugbauer, Video Bureau Beijing & Guangzhou
  • Rencontres Internationales 2012, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
  • Rencontres Internationales 2012, FILMOTECA ESPAÑOLA, CINE DORÉ, Madrid
  • Rencontres Internationales 2011, Gaîté Lyrique, Paris
  • 20th anniversary of The Case of California, University of California, Santa Barbara
  • Wäscherei (Kunstverein Zürich), Zürich
  • MAKnite, MAK, Wien
The Mackeys. Experimental Film. 2010. Videostill

The Mackeys evolved out of a six months residency during the MAK Schindler Program in Los Angeles.

A filmic collage on Los Angeles based on former residents‘s memories, diary entries, references to art, literature and film. It starts with a young woman talking about a confusion of two movies with nearly identical titles – L.A. Plays Itself and Los Angeles Plays Itself.
Subsequently follows a remake of the opening titles to Thom Anderson‘s Los Angeles Plays Itself. A couple of minutes later we hear the sound of an helicopter taken from the opening sequence of Robert Altman‘s Short Cuts while the camera pans in bird‘s-eye view across the hedge‘s and front yard of R.M. Schindler‘s Mackey Apartment House. A voiceover recites a passage from Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber:

„To make myself at least somewhat comprehensible I shall have to speak much in images and similes, which may at times perhaps be only approximately correct. For the only way a human being can make supernatural matters, which in their essence must remain incomprehensible, understandable to a certain degree is by compairing them with known facts of human experience.“