Richard Kerr's Stilled Cinema: Instilled Visions, Distilled Revisions

Richard Kerr’s Demi-monde (2004) is a fascinating dual projector slide show, a fluid series of decomposed and recomposed frames taken from trailers for Hollywood films. Presenting a demi-monde of form and content, Kerr proves that cinema has many more lives, and counters the current rhetoric on the death of film. Demi-monde is like a sneak preview of the afterlife of film. But, no matter how aesthetically pleasing, Kerr’s trailer for the cinematic hereafter is a hellish one, one composed with Hollywood’s violent waste. Demi-monde is a descent into the underworld of cinema as well as an autopsy of its demons. The dissolving images create a diegesis both familiar and distancing, its continuity of time and space reminiscent of a story yet very unusual, tracing the thin line between sleep and consciousness, fantasy and nightmare, awe and fear.