Within the standard creativeness, the American West is without delay a spot of peril, solitude and liberation – a imaginative and prescient most famously expressed in Hollywood westerns. It’s additionally a spot of immense pure magnificence, as mirrored in Georgia O’Keeffe’s famed renderings of the New Mexico panorama. Each of those visions of the West intermingle within the US filmmaker Courtney Stephens’s movie Ida Western Exile.
The experimental work performs out in a sequence of recorded cellphone calls through which Stephens nervously enquires about points – from the quantity of canned tuna one can eat with out subjecting themselves to mercury poisoning, to the provision of one thing known as a ‘zombie killer machete’ – that replicate her intention to spend a while alone, away from society. And her chosen vacation spot appears to be the American West, as implied by a sequence of pictures of its extraordinary, red-tinted and rocky landscapes, that are at occasions overlayed with the O’Keeffe work impressed by them. Via this framework, Stephens builds an idiosyncratic meditation on how, in her words, ‘emancipation is curiously coupled with danger’ – a fact that tends to be particularly inescapable for ladies.
