11 min / 2016 / HD Video / 2K
“Alyona Larionova’s ‘Across Lips’ attempts communication across such vast distances and between such vastly differing objects, cultures, times, that it arrives at a kind of perspective calm; things seem related, even if that’s only through their elegant ranging. This reality seems weird as all hell - as weird as a phony Grand Canal in a Vegas casino: carved wooden everypeople in something like a church that worships a compact server farm instead of a Christ oddly marshalled with improvisation by a jazz drummer. There is so much here - all of it actually there - that the mind lurches with a feeling of missing some vital fact: the facts of a real place, with all the concomitant oddity of reality. Everything here is trying to decipher everything else, and using its own discrete cipher, the details of which are withheld from everyone but the drummer, who can only paraphrase in yelps of percussive, nonsensical Morse code, out of time and history and nuance. I’m sure someone else would know exactly where this is.” (Ed Atkins, artist)
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Credits
Directed and produced by: Alyona Larionova
Monologue: Caleb Klaces
Voice: Adam Cunis
Cinematographer: Alex Grigoras
Steadycam (US): Drew Dorsey
Sound design & mix: Filipe Pinheiro
Music: Martin France
Special thanks to: Adrian Thomas, the Internet Archive (San Francisco) and Kevin Scully, Bethnal Green Church.