Ronald McDonald is the gun-toting badass wreaking havoc on a Los Angeles depicted as - and inhabited solely by - logos in H5's ecstatically apocalyptic short animation Logorama. The red-headed clown tyrannizes the city, the Michelin Man tries to counter, but they're well-matched, and soon, it looks like a lot of logos are going to die. The hilarious short by the directing team from France revels less in the wild antics of its characters and the superb 3-D animation spun by its makers than in the dizzying, thrilling effect of insouciant trademark violation. And it doesn't stop - the story unfolds, the city splits into pieces, and still the logos continue, well into deep space. The not-so-subtle commentary deftly punctures consumer culture, managing to dazzle at both the low and the high end; it also marks the Flux Screening Series as, again, the place to find the best in contemporary moving imagery. The next show, coming up Tuesday, September 15, at the Hammer Museum, also features work by Jonathan Glazer, Spike Jonze, Synola and more. Oh, and if you want to read a bit more about Logorama, check out this nice interview with the makers on the Creativity site.
the details:See the Flux site for RSVP details
the screening is free
Hammer Museum
screening: 8:00 p.m.; party: 10:00 p.m. Billy Wilder Theater
10899 Wilshire Blvd.
310-443-7000
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To me, H5's amazing Logorama marks the long-awaited Hiroshima moment in the copyright wars. Nearly every image in the video is a copyright or trademark violation of one kind or another, but the videomakers seem indifferent to the political melee they have entered. Appropriation art used to flaunt various forms of piracy as an end in itself - as Negativland famously put it, "copyright violation is your best entertainment value." But at a certain point, this type of nose-thumbing at the legal departments of corporate America is a one-line joke that doesn't add much to a very real struggle over what ordinary people can and should expect to be able to do with their culture. Logorama dramatically raises the ante on why we should be able to talk back to the brand-purveyors who dominate our commerce, culture and media.