The Long Take Film Club: The Andre Trilogy
James N. Kienitz Wilkins's Andre Trilogy is three films that keep asking the same slippery question: what happens to reality once entertainment gets its hands on it? Each film unsettles the border between document and performance, in ways that are as funny as they are disorientating.
Special Features (2014) opens the trilogy as a lo-fi interview built around a small mishap — presented with the texture of a forgotten video production, half testimony, half performance.
TESTER (2015) follows a private eye recounting a complicated case, the whole thing set against an unedited BetaSP tape running in real time.
B-ROLL with Andre (2015) combines stock footage with GoPro-shot imagery to build an anonymous monologue — a prisoner's account of a dangerous dream, mediated until it's hard to say whose voice you're actually hearing.
The three films were shot in sequential technological formats — BetaSP, MiniDV, HD — each format matched to its place in the trilogy's internal timeline: prequel, original, sequel. Format isn't decoration here; it's doing the storytelling.
About the filmmaker
James N. Kienitz Wilkins is a filmmaker and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His work has screened at the New York Film Festival, Toronto, Locarno, Rotterdam, Migrating Forms, Ann Arbor, CPH:DOX, MoMA PS1, BAMcinemaFest, and Images, among others. He received the Kazuko Trust Award from the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 2016, was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and had a retrospective of his work shown at Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal (RIDM) that same year. In 2018 he premiered new work in solo shows at Gasworks in London and the Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement in Geneva. He trained at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York.
The evening
As with every Long Take, the screening is followed by discussion in the cinema, then social in the courtyard with pizza and beers — our curators and the community of cinéastes who gather each month help shape sense out of these stories together.
Wednesday 30 September, doors 19:00, The Bioscope, Milpark. Membership is free via our WhatsApp channel; individual tickets through The Bioscope.