FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Advertorial

Nitehawk's Art Seen Series Presents 'Rough Cut'

In his debut film Rough Cut, UK artist Jamie Shovlin deconstructs filmmaking by creating a documentary that shows the process of remaking a horror movie that actually never happened.

Nitehawk Cinema has teamed up with Absolut to bring you another installment in the Art Seen series—the mission being to show the relationship between film and visual art by showcasing works that are most often screened in a gallery setting. This weekend they'll be showing Rough Cut, with an introduction by the director, Jamie Shovlin, via Skype. They will also be airing the short film, Interiors, by artist Darren Banks.

Advertisement

In his debut film Rough Cut, UK artist Jamie Shovlin deconstructs filmmaking by creating a documentary that shows the process of remaking a horror movie that actually never happened. This film is the near inevitable outcome of Shovlin’s multi-year project called Hiker Meat which centers around a fake exploitation movie and fictitious Italian director named Jesus Rinzoli along with the never-existed German band Lustfaust. Confused? You won’t be. Taking a cue from Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1973), Rough Cut takes audiences through the process of how trickery, fake bands and directors, collaboration, and homage to actual movies can actually produce something with real meaning.

To initiate the unfamiliar, I asked Shovlin a few questions about Rough Cut, horror films, and the Lustfaust score.

VICE: How would you describe the Hiker Meat project to someone who's becoming aware of it for the first time via Rough Cut?
Jamie Shovlin: Rough Cutfocuses on an attempt to remake parts of Hiker Meat but Hiker Meat itself is a construct—a metaphoric and literal amalgamation of late 1970s horror clichés. Hiker Meat was originated as a construct that could be visibly deconstructed without ever becoming a film and it was always the central idea that this process would be the heart of the project. It was never imagined that it’d take on a filmic form as it eventually does in Rough Cut. But its presence in Rough Cut is a mirror of its presence in the larger project—it’s there so other things can happen. Hiker Meat is effectively the false hand that allows Rough Cut to exist.

You've said that your interest in this project is how artifice mirrors reality, which  something particularly heightened in horror film. How did you decide to use the horror genre to embody this idea and out of the numerous horror/slasher films you researched for this project, how did you select the ones that would be re-made for Rough Cut?
The fact that Hiker Meat is a horror film is part inheritance and part nostalgia. As a concept, it originated out of the earlier Lustfaust project, where a similarly non-existent band provided the stimulus for a collection of homemade cassette art. Hiker Meat was supposedly the name of an imaginary film that was scored in Lustfaust’s seventh album, Überblicken/Überzeugen, and as such was primarily related as a few short paragraphs written by Mike Harte (whose name provides the anagrammatic inflection for the film-within-a-film’s title). It was a proggy concept album written in the late 1970s—fantastic horror was a tight fit in terms of content. When it came to developing the Hiker Meat project, it didn’t hurt that each of the three of us involved—myself, Mike and Euan Rodger, who scored the film—were the right age to have been fully immersed in seventies horror as teenagers—we knew the material and reference points well. It later became clear that if you’re constructing a hypothetical film from a suggestive constellation of supporting material—posters, costumes, props—then late 1970s horror does most of the work for you, being perhaps the most standardised of formulaic genre-types.

Can you talk a little bit about Lustfaust and the music in Rough Cut?
There are two soundtracks in Rough Cut, both written and performed by Euan. The first is the soundtrack he composed for Hiker Meat back in 2010, that was prepared with the understanding of it being a standalone audio work without any reference to visuals in display. It ultimately became the only continuum between the ‘original’ Hiker Meat—a reference-only collage of clips from existing horror films that constitutes the action of the non-existent film—and the remake in Rough Cut, where we re-shot, shot-for-shot, parts of that collage. The second soundtrack is for Rough Cut, which is a voice-only piece and is intended to contrast the Giallo baroque of the Hiker Meat score. The original score presented an interesting conundrum for Euan—he was scoring a film that didn’t exist in the character of a band that similarly didn’t exist. He talks about it in Rough Cut—about doing something in character whilst attempting to present something of your self at the same time. It’s that play, the social construction of your self as a character, a practitioner and a person, that is explored throughout the project. How method can you go and how method do you need to go to end up somewhere else?

Nitehawk Cinema's Art Seen Screening
June 5th at Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave.
Brooklyn, NY
7:30 PM 

Buy Tickets here.