CAMERON JAMIE
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CAMERON JAMIE
Kranky Klaus / BB / Spook House
Three films by Cameron Jamie with live soundtrack music from The Melvins.
UK Tour November 2003
In his powerful new films, underground US filmmaker Cameron Jamie explores the spook houses of Detroit in the days running up to Halloween and unearths unseasonally violent behaviour by a legendary beast called the Krampus at Christmas time in Austria. Jamie’s vertiginous takes on vernacular rituals are heightened by the sounds of highly influential band The Melvins.
Filmed in the white working-class suburbs of Detroit, Spook House reveals a community revelling in the macabre. Front lawns are transformed into cemeteries, kitchens become mausoleums and dismembered ‘bodies’ are prepared for cannibal feasts. Jamie’s camera tracks the celebrants as the nights become longer and darker.
In the snowbound villages of central Austria on 6 December, villagers congregate in homes to await a visit by a benign St Nicholas bearing seasonal gifts. They are also waiting for the Krampus, strange mythical beasts with shaggy coats and serious attitude. As St Nicholas rewards the good, so the Krampus punish the bad. Kranky Klaus tracks a herd of Krampus as they work their way through the village mauling and menacing to the very limits of acceptable intimidation.
Jamie’s acclaimed film of LA teenage wrestlers, BB, completes the trilogy. Kids jump from the tops of garages and slam into each other with chairs and ladders. Jamie’s raw black and white footage fuses with The Melvins’ pounding soundtrack to make what Jamie calls “a purgatory state of being”. The primal and pre-modern confront the ‘civilised’ world in works of ominous intensity.
In the first UK tour of their collaboration, The Melvins perform the soundtrack music live with large-scale projections of Jamie’s films in music venues across England, culminating at The Forum in London on 28 November 2003.
Cameron Jamie
Born in 1969 in Los Angeles and raised in the LA suburbs of the San Fernando Valley, Jamie has explored the dark underbelly of the American dream in drawings, film and performance. Rare screenings of BB with The Melvins have generated huge interest. The tour with The Melvins marks the premiere of Jamie’s work in Britain.
The Melvins
Formed in 1984 in Aberdeen, Washington State, cult three-man band The Melvins have been hugely influential on some of the seminal bands of the last two decades including Nirvana. Drum, bass and guitar combine to create a powerful and claustrophobic sound.
Gluey Porch Treatment and Stones Witch count amongst The Melvins’ classic releases, and their most recent CD, 26 Songs. was released on Ipecac Records
(2003).
A programme of talks and events accompanies Spook House, BB and Kranky Klaus including Cameron Jamie in Conversation with Alex Farquharson, Cameron Jamie and The Melvins, Noël Noir, an alternative Christmas panto and Backslang, a short film responding to Jamie’s BB project.
Commissioned and produced by Artangel in association with the Centre Pompidou, Paris with the support of the Délégation aux arts plastiques, Ministère de la Culture, France.
With the support of the National Touring programme of Arts Council England. Regional Co-Presenters: FACT, Liverpool; Institute of Visual Culture, Cambridge; The Junction, Cambridge; John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Milton Keynes Gallery; Spacex, Exeter and the University of Brighton.
