Getting Closer: Films by Daniel Jacoby

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, November 1 at 7pm for Getting Closer, a screening of Daniel Jacoby’s Mountain Plain Mountain (co-dir. Yu Araki, 2018), Nehemías (2019), and No One Cried (2021), followed by a video Q&A with the artist. 

Daniel Jacoby’s moving-image works are characteristic of an inventive and subjective approach to topics such as alienation, isolation, belonging, friendship, desire, and spirituality. To get the viewer closer to the unfamiliar angles of the everyday Jacoby explores ambiguous questions with no direct answers, and re-stages mundane situations in uncanny or dystopian ways.

Films

Mountain Plain Mountain (co-dir. Yu Araki, 2018, 21 minutes)
Mountain Plain Mountain was shot in Obihiro, Japan, at the last standing venue to host a rare kind of draft-horse racing known as Ban’ei. Putting together a mix of motionless, contemplative shots and hard-edge, rhythmical, gibberish-rich montages, the slowness of these bizarre races is turned inside out. The track’s topography, poetically described by a veteran trainer as “a small mountain, a plain, and a big mountain,” is what informs the overall timeline of the film.

Nehemías (2019, 16 minutes)
Nehemías is an atmospheric portrait of Christian, a young man from the city who finds himself an outsider in his new home, a poor village called Cocachimba in the jungle of Peru. Fragments from colorful Cubist paintings playfully interrupt the image while the camera shows nature in ever-flowing motion. Sitting on a rock, Christian philosophizes about his newfound situation and recalls being visited by a mythical “devil” in the dark of the night.

No One Cried (2021, 23 minutes)
From plain white walls to bombastically crafted backdrops, adult chat rooms are portals to people’s fantasy worlds. Focusing on the moments when performers are off-screen, a meticulous concatenation of ghostly spaces takes us on an unsettling journey of self-expression and lonesome desire. The growing discomfort with what has happened or is about to happen in these empty rooms is interspersed with fragments of interviews with “camgirls” and “camboys,” delving into the psychological repercussions of this digital type of sex work.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility        
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.      
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.      
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.