Rounding out the trilogy of performance video featuring Kelly Broich, Eli Elliott, and Brad Kaup, is HOMESTEAD. The “how to” series started with MUSH, where the performance centered around a cooking demonstration on how you can have a high calorie diet for less than $20 a week by combining dollar store food items, then FASHION revealed how to take thrift store clothing and turn them into high dollar fashion items, concluding with a $40,000 created garment, and now HOMESTEAD reveals how one can live for free in style by simply finding some land, staking it, then creating cardboard homes which you can decorate to your liking.
The performance takes place in a striking outdoor location, where a river runs near and mountains serve as back drops for the pair of pilgrims, Pink Face and Roy, who stake their land and proceed to create cozy and decorative little homes for themselves.
The performance plays on a level that is somewhere between the trendy “tiny home movement” and the classic homeless/cardboard box scenario. This indeed is a murky area that rarely gets talked about as now those with money are purposely downsizing and creating very fashionable tiny homes on trailers, while declaring it to be a new fashionable trend and indeed a “movement.”
Meanwhile “tiny homes” have essentially been created for years by houseless individuals, in the form of tented encampments, wooded shacks, or inexpensive mobile RV’s and trailers. It has now become a trend to become “homeless”, as long as you build your dwelling on a trailer and make it look nice on the inside, and out.
Pink Face and Roy create their own little tiny homes, yet they do not exist in skid row, but won’t be making any of the trendy tiny house blogs either. It’s a gray area which seems to speak on the absence of in between individuals who can’t afford to play in the pretentious tiny home scene, yet don’t deal themselves the helpless/homeless card either.
In HOMESTEAD the relationship between the two characters remains a mystery, as do their choice of facial wear. Yet in this piece we see Roy engaging in more central action, rather than just serving as a sidekick for Pink Face. They both build their homes, create a kitchen area, empty their toilets (a nasty scene), and set up their individual play tents while squabbling over their choice of women’s clothing, “is this your skirt Roy or mine?”
MUSH,FASHION and HOMESTEAD are designed to be shown on 3 separate HD screens simultaneously in a gallery setting. For inquiries contact the artists HERE
HOMESTEAD (dir. Kelly Broich. Cinematography Brad Kaup. Featuring Eli Elliott. HD, 45min. 2016)
The latest trend in online cinema has been what’s being referred to as “Social Cinema”. It refers to Instagram’s video uploads which are limited to 15 seconds. The most popular being a high budget TV-like series called “SHIELD 5” which involve episodes which are all 15 seconds long.
(Update – Instagram just announced they are increasing video length to 60 seconds within the next few months.)
Rather than complain about the new state of online cinema, a few have decided to dive in and subvert the trend.
Eli Elliott has been taking much of his previous work and giving it brand new life through 15 second Social Cinema films. He also has been creating new works under the tight structure that the time limit requires. The results are a flurry of new viewership and a recycling of older works no longer sustainable in the dying festival circuit, and viewed much less nowadays in the landfill which YouTube has become.
Ferguson Ulrich: Does Social Cinema make sense for an alternative film/video maker to partake in?
Eli Elliott: Yeah. You can complain about it and take the hoity-toity attitude just like everyone did when YouTube first came out. No one wanted to put their experimental films on YouTube because they thought they were “above it all.” Of course these same people now all have YouTube channels! It’s like where the fuck were all of you 10 years ago when the window was wide open to subvert this online platform with experimental/underground works? Their avant garde attitude wasn’t experimental film forward thinking at all as they didn’t understand the digital environment and how to swim within it to maintain vibrancy in alternative cinema/film/videomaking.
FU: Are there many Social Cinema experimental works on Instagram currently?
EE: Collapse Productions have also been uploading their previous works, along with creating new social cinema films and they are all killer. Some others here and there, but surprisingly very few are subverting it. But as like before, a windows opened and not many are paying attention to it let alone climbing through it. I make it a point to upload one freshly and usually carefully edited piece a day and Collapse has been doing the same.
FU: What’s it say that we are at a point where “Social Cinema” is actually a thing and that 15 second films are being created?
EE: Yeah it’s the digital environment and the massively sped up situation we exist in. Remember it was only 10 years ago when YouTube set their video upload limit at ten minutes. Part of their reasoning was that the attention span of the viewer was thought to be tapped out at the 10 minute mark. So now we have gone from a 10 minute attention span tap-out, to a 15-60 second attention span limit!!!
FU: So now the latest is that Instagram is pushing the limit to a whopping 60 seconds!
EE: Yeah just when I was getting better at forming 15 second films they’re jacking it up to 60 seconds! But the 15 seconds actually made sense as far as viewership went. They get viewed easily, everyone has 15 seconds. But 60 second films will inevitably be viewed much less, as now even that seems a struggle for many in this day and age of Social Media aka “Social MindNumbia”.
FU: What’s your Instagram handle and how do people find your pieces and Collapse’s works on Instagram.
EE: It’s elliott_eli and Collapse is collapse_productions. I also created the hashtag #SocialCinemaBrut to separate the typical Social Cinema stuff and establish a sort of outsider Art Brut section for the experimental video works, the weirder things, and alt pieces, etc.
Collapse Productions have uploaded many of their short films on VIMEO, including BLOODY BOXES, SQUIRREL MOMMY, MENSTRUAL, DOLL ABUSE and many others. Follow their channel as many more will be uploaded this month.
Many of these films have finished up screening on the underground film festival circuit and are now available for viewing online.
Visit their VIMEO page and please SHARE these films on FACEBOOK and other outlets so they can get the wider viewing they deserve!
The San Francisco Underground Short Film Festival will be screening two short films from Collapse’s Kelly Broich. In the first program Broich’s recent short DOLL ABUSE will screen, and in program 2, BLOODY BOXES from Collapse Productions will make it’s San Francisco debut.
“SFUSFF celebrates the underground, overlooked, avant-garde, and ultra outrageous films of the Bay Area. SFUSFF has run since 2003 as the concluding event of the Midnight Mass screening series, which began in 1998.
Three experimental pieces have recently surfaced. The first is an absurdist work from Collapse called “It’s A Man”, next is a work from Eli Elliott titled “Teacher/Student”, and finally a bizarre video featuring, and called, “Doll Abuse”.
Collapse productions have been shooting a series of new work and sent in a few stills to share. These “anti-comedy sketch shorts” will be featured in the upcoming Absurdist Film Festival (#2) slated to premiere in late October of 2014 and will feature artists on this site as well as a slew of recent works from newly discovered video artists who all create in the absurdist vein.
More on the festival to come, as well as news on some upcoming absurdist documentaries and films both currently in production and soon to be released.
Joey heard Charles climb the creaky stairs, the opening of the bolted door and saw his daddy enter his room palming a head of wet lettuce. Charles was dressed in tan Dockers and a yellow golf shirt that read CromNet across his left breast. His blond hair was neatly trimmed and his face clean-shaven.
“You are going to eat this,” Charles said holding up the head of lettuce.
“I don’t like lettuce,” Joey replied.
“Get in your goddamned highchair!”
Scared, Joey scrambled off his red racecar bed and squeezed himself into the metal highchair.
“I work goddamn hard at the Internet company to get food to feed you and goddamn if you’re not going to eat your vegetables.”
Charles had removed Joey from school a year ago when he was thirteen. Thirteen was the age a student was legally allowed to halt their studies.
Joey had said it a million times before and he said it again now:
“If Mommy was here she wouldn’t make me eat my vegetables and if she was here, I probably would.”
Charles lifted an inquisitive brow. “Has mommy been trying to send you telepathic messages from heaven again? Did you rip the tinfoil?”
“Yes, and she said I didn’t have to eat my vegetables, but I didn’t rip the tinfoil.”
“I call bullshit, Joey,” Charles said, inspecting the floor-to-ceiling tinfoil. “Because I know for a fact that tinfoil keeps out all telepathic transmissions and I don’t see any holes or tears.”
Joey, wearing his silk pajamas with white trim, stared at Charles from his highchair with pert lips, his blue eyes offering nothing.
“You have an I.Q. of 80. You’re practically a retard staring at me with your dumb eyes. You know that?”
“Yes. I know, Daddy.”
Charles walked over and told Joey to open his mouth. Joey tightened his lips. Charles squished his mouth open and pressed the head of lettuce against it.
“Bite. I work hard at the Internet company to buy this food and I want you to eat your goddamned vegetables. Now take a bite. If you don’t, you’re going to die, Joey. You’re going to die of malnutrition.”
Joey batted the head of lettuce away. It came to rest near an empty glass container of chocolate milk next to his racecar bed.
“I need to go poopie,” Joey said.
Charles sighed. “Fine. Take your poopie and then you’re eating the lettuce.”
“Okay, Daddy,” Joey said.
Joey hopped off his highchair and entered his tiny bathroom. Charles had taken off the lock, but Joey shut the door, lowered his bottoms and sat down on a white urine-stained toilet.
He grunted and squeezed and heard a plop. He got up and looked at a nearly perfectly round ball of poop with a small crevice. Joey wished more would come. His stomach hurt, but he was glad to get some out. He had awful gas and pangs of constipation.
He flushed the toilet without wiping and opened the door.
“Did you wash your hands?” Charles asked.
“I forgot, Dad.”
“Goddamnit.” Charles grabbed him by the nap of his neck, twisted on the water, rubbed blue soap over his hands and put them under the stream and then toweled them off.
“You’re bad, Joey. Nothing but a tack in my ass. A dozen tacks in my ass.”
“I don’t mean to be tacks in your ass, Daddy.”
“Well, you are. Same routine every day.”
“Yesterday it was radishes and I had gone poopie earlier.”
“It doesn’t matter the type of vegetable, Joey. You won’t eat them is the point.”
It was true, he wouldn’t eat his vegetables and his daddy had kept him locked in his room as punishment until he would. After mommy died and the fat cops had taken the neighbor away, Joey couldn’t eat his vegetables. He once loved them, because his mommy had a garden teeming with all sorts of vegetables, and she loved them. Her garden was her passion and he associated eating vegetables with his love for his mommy. However, when the neighbor man ‘violated her love flower and put her to sleep in the garden’ as daddy put it, he couldn’t eat them. Never would he eat them. Vegetables equaled emotional pain.
“I will never eat my vegetables, Daddy.” Joey said with finality.
Charles eyes shrunk into a glare and he angrily chewed his bottom lip. He then lifted Joey off his feet and tossed him on the racecar bed. He quickly grabbed the head of lettuce, squeezed open Joey’s mouth, and twisted the ball of lettuce side to side. Joey’s face turned red as he began to wheeze and choke. Daddy then punched his left leg. Daddy had yelled every day and tried force feeding Joey, but this was the first time he had struck him. Joey reached back and tore away a section of tin foil which did nothing but enrage his father further.
“I told you never to mess with the tinfoil. Never!” He grated the head of lettuce deeper into his mouth and jabbed his ribs repeatedly. Joey finally slapped the lettuce away. He spit out remnants, regained his breath and said Mommy had just telepathically communicated that he didn’t have to eat his vegetables ever. Even though it had never been fully explained to him, Joey understood that telepathic communication were messages silently spoken from mind to mind. His daddy had always believed in some strange things Mommy used to tell him. It was harmless she had said. Silly distractions to keep him not so bitter about his underpaid and undervalued job at CromNet — the Internet company.
“Mommy also said you should let me leave my room.”
Charles stood up, hands on his hips and stared at Joey with fire. Joey was going to do more than leave his room, Charles thought. This had gone on nearly two months and this day, it would end. He no longer cared if Joey was only thirteen and it was his parental obligation to keep him until eighteen. He grabbed Joey’s ankles and pulled him from the bedroom, down the carpeted stairs, through the living room and down the concrete steps outside the house and into the yard.
Joey stood up, felt the back of his head and saw blood on his fingers.
“That hurt, Daddy!”
“You are no longer my son. Go!”
“But I don’t have any shoes.”
Without sitting, Charles pulled off his leather shoes and threw them at Joey who sat down on the grass in front of their two-story brick house and put them on. They were many sizes too big.
“You just go now,” Charles said.
Joey stood and shrugged. “Okay, Daddy. Can I keep in touch with you telepathically?”
“You can try whatever you want, but I’m going to tinfoil the entire house.”
“What happens if you’re at work?” Joey asked. “The Internet company won’t let you tinfoil your office.”
“You’re a smartass. The worst smartass I ever knew. Get off my property!”
“Okay. Bye, Dad,” Joey said.
Joey turned and walked away. He would walk the many miles to the river and swim in his underwear, he thought. Swimming was something he and his mommy once liked to do when he was much littler and she was alive; however, he promised himself as he walked down a sidewalk in his over-sized leather shoes, he would never eat another vegetable never, ever even if it meant he became malnourished and died.
Kelly Broich is the author of the novel PRECIOUS. He is also the author of the video below.
ELI E / KELLY B . “Moonscape of Failed Hope Finds a Yesteryear of Good Fortune”
Continued from their recent sessions.
TYKYLEVITS. “Se hänelle kertokaa”
BUZZ COASTIN. “SEE THE MAN AT TURD & PUNCH BOWL”
a video mix mashter of current event reality sewn together with commentary and mirrored with b-movie fictionality.
ANDY HECK BOYD “HELL HOLE (2013)”
a video art piece comprised completely of animated internet GIF’s, backed by random audio from television and cinema.
Recently a collaboration took place between two Absurdist Video Artists, Kelly Broich the ringleader of COLLLAPSE productions, and Eli Elliott who’s been traveling around via greyhound bus . He recently made his second visit to Collapse Studios in Boise, Idaho. The last time, a few years ago, a number of shorts were shot, and a feature film was rumored to have been completed (yet never released).
This time around a series of improvisational pieces were performed, filmed and edited.
The “Eli E and Kelly B Sessions” proved to maintain, if not improve upon, the oddity, absurdity, and bizarro visual imagery of their cinematic collaboration history.
Here are the completed sessions:
“You Can’t But We Can” is a sequel of sorts to an earlier performance between Eli E and Kelly B called INCHWORM . This time around “the band” expands a bit while the sounds improve.
Kelly B brings back his character JIMMY for this brief trigger piece. Eli plays Jimmy’s pink colored seizure.
The two turn to brutally subjecting the viewer with an 11 minute aurora of audio “sound healing”. Theta Brain Wave Therapy.
Kelly B. performs a shop-vac solo:
Apparently, Eli E. underwent a “screen test” for an upcoming production slated for 2013.
Some avant garde penis enlargement commercials were also filmed, but were quickly banned from YouTube and 5 other video sharing websites.
ABSURDIST VIDEO ART 