For Example: A Critique of Never (1971)

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For Example: A Critique of Never (1971)

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This work by Arakawa, the Japanese conceptual artist responsible for Why Not, is equally original and even more subversive. Here reality itself – the truth of the image – is insidiously called into question. Feature-length, this is a coldly objective record of a 7-year-old child derelict, totally alone, living as a drunkard on New York's Bowery. The ruthless yet compassionate camera explores his world, often in oppressive "real time", following his every degradation and defeat (including his attempts to stop indifferent passers-by) until a traumatic, catatonic seizure in a telephone booth; a searing, terrifying sequence. But the metaphysical twist is still to come: the documentary is not a documentary, the child drunkard "only" an actor. But, says Arakawa, there exists a child such as this somewhere; hence his portrayal in real streets of such blight that they resemble cityscapes destroyed by war, is "true": "This is a willful switch from the documentary as a 'truthful' account to a new form, one which employs the weight of evidence, the pace of reality only as an impetus or format for the onset of a cinema of investigation,an investigation which the filmmaker has willed to exist. As such, it is as much a new reality as a new "story".

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For Example: A Critique of Never (1971)

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