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Just JasperJasper was born in 1994 in Copenhagen. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. His works can be found in the collections of such prestigious institutions as the Tate in London, the Castello di Rivoli in Turin and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. His films have been shown at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Tel Aviv, the Brooklyn Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius (CAC) in Vilnius, and the Casino Luxemburg w Luxembourg. Jasper Just’s films are distinguished by their departure from the tendency toward making films of a documentary nature. The artist creates dark, moody narrations, devoid of lengthy dialogues, playing on the senses and imagination with light and shadow, music and imagery. The combination of their visual character with understandable but ambitious narratives, and his incisive but brief observations makes Just’s work comparable in style to such titans of film as Luchino Visconti and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, or younger directors such as Gus Van Sant and David Lynch. Cinematic allusions frequently appear in his films, as in The Lonely Villa (2004), which is a direct reference to D. W. Griffith’s 1909 production, and the title of one of his best-known films (now in the Tate collection) Bliss and Heaven is excerpted from A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick (the scene in which Alex listens to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony). At the same time, when a character in Bliss and Heaven sings Olivia Newton John’s Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting in a nineteenth-century concert hall, it is a reference to Trent Harris’s The Beaver Trilogy, filmed in the late 1970’s and early 1980s. Each of his films is large production, involving professional actors, singers, light and sound technicians and cinematographers. Thanks to their expert work, we are left with extraordinary film objects. The professionalism of the production of the films brings Just’s works near to Matthew Barney, Chris Cunningham and Francesco Vezzoli. He is like a miniaturist who, with an extraordinary, almost excessive sensitivity, captures human emotions, extracting sadness, melancholy, regret, as well as indifference and passivity from his characters. |
Just nightThe first presentation in Poland on this scale of the films of Jasper Just, one of the world’s most important film media artists, a foretaste of which we can find could find in last August’s presentation Sorrow Conquers Happiness at the OFF Festival, organised by the No Local Chronicles and Foundation. Just’s work concerns the problem of masculinity, toppling its traditional definitions. In some of his films, allusions to Greek dramas can be seen, in which all of the roles are played by men, even the parts that would in modern productions be played by women. In this sense, men are presented as both the dominators and the dominated. In No Man is an Island II (2004), the main character (played by the actor Johannes Lilleore, who appears in all of Just’s films) sitting in a smoky men’s club, unexpectedly stands and breaks the dignified silence by breaking into a rendition of Roy Orbison’s ballad of lost love, Crying. After a moment, the other older men sitting in the club stand and, taking the role of the Greek choir, accompany the actor. In Just’s films, music is typically, as in this case, a type of dialogue between the young principal character and the supporting cast. In a certain sense, this male choir of No Man is an Island, the human voice, confirms and comments on the main character’s suffering – desire, rejection, regret, loss, isolation. This is a function which operates antithetically to the standard, male modus operandi. Aside from the subject of male identity as a social construct, the second central motif of his work is the relationship between various generations, the passage of time, and memory. Just’s films are filled with tension, uncertainty, and suspense, alluding to the masters of black and white film such as Jean-Pierre Melleville. Just himself acknowledges that Melleville is his icon where he draws his inspiration from. |
14/06/2010
19:00 Just night
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