Oedipal Effigies & Modern Myths

7pm • Friday, January 26, 2018
Broad Art Museum, Educational Wing

—Programmed by Yelena Kalinsky & Ellen McCallum

Taking a cue from the Broad’s exhibition Michigan Stories: Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, this program presents three films—two of which are Kelley collaborations—that are dark allegories of modern life: Peggy and Fred and Pete (1988), Kappa (1986), and Blind Country (1989). Children raised by television wander a post-apocalyptic landscape. A hedonistic folk demon satirizes the Oedipus myth. And a castrated buffoon is led through a feminine “realm of the senses.” Traditional sources of authority are unmasked, and we are cast into a dystopian present. As the narrator of Blind Country recites: “Our experience is surely, but gently, becoming pure absence. That is our evolutionary imperative. All prying objects, all things striving to trespass are diminishing. Now there is only acceptance. Accept, accept your loss.”

Broad Underground is an ongoing collaboration between the MSU Broad, Film Studies program, and Department of English at MSU. This year’s partnering venue is The Robin Theatre in REO Town, Lansing, with special thanks to the Lansing Public Media Center.

Event Flyer