bloodlust of the wolf
(2015, live cinema perofrmance)
Drawing from a swath of classical music, like Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the Flowers, Timothy Brock's Nanook of the North score, and more, we created a live electronic score for this remix film.
From Simon:
Blood Lust of the Wolf is a new live cinema performance that remixes the classic film Nanook of the North (dir. Robert Flaherty, 1922) into a fugue state about race, ethnicity and exploitation.
The landscape and personas, fragmented by Flaherty's narrative compulsions, are reconstructed into new people and places, inviting the audience to reconsider their own positions and complicities.
I previously worked with Nanook as source material for live cinema in 2007 for a short piece called Tiamak, in which I appropriated the film and fashioned a meta-narrative of environmental catastrophe and aboriginal annihilation.
In Blood Lust of the Wolf, I take a new, and more sweeping approach, this time dissecting and reassembling the core of what makes Flaherty's film disturbing yet compelling nearly a century later—the film’s approach to ethnography.
“A white guy (Flaherty) made a film using aboriginal peoples and culture as a tool to his own ends, then another white guy (me) uses that very film as source material to talk about, among other things, the longstanding problems that kind of thinking perpetrates? Dicey.”