GOING SOUTH
dir. Dominic Gagnon, 2018
Canada, 104 min
In English
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4 – 5 PM
MONDAY, DECEMBER 12 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20 – 7:30 PM
The second part of Dominic Gagnon’s tetralogy exploring “the cardinal points of the internet in a post-truth era,” GOING SOUTH follows its controversial predecessor, OF THE NORTH, with a wide-ranging look at the first-world’s often-fraught relationship and imagining of the global south. Culled from a wide swath of internet videos Gagnon creates an auto-ethnographic portrait of the droll, post-apocalyptic, digitally-suffused banal existence we call contemporary life. From cruise ship revelers swimming through typhoons to Grandmothers narrating walkthroughs of survival videogames to all sorts of wannabe social media presences airing their anxieties and purse contents on the internet, Gagnon slowly paints a bleak, portrait of today’s malaise without ever seeking to narrativize or directly comment upon it.
“Without leaving the comfort of his own browser, Gagnon has made a film cosmic in scope, including material that could be taken as his own gloss on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), shuttling as he does between outer space and prehistory, albeit a prehistory of a very contemporary sort. Gagnon’s collage offers us a panoramic view of a human race convinced of salvation through the self, including and especially through the optimal monetization of personal branding and validation via metrics, while its shared home dies for want of collective action, mankind unable to find common cause in preserving the environment due to an increasingly epidemic mistrust in any passed down knowledge that isn’t derived from firsthand experience. In the end you’ve only got yourself! You only know what you know, you know?
Rather than any single latitude, the imagery here locates us generally in the vague terrain of vacation, retreat, getaway—there is merriment on waterslides, bros in wetsuits barfing up the contents of beer bongs, and a nude woman well into middle age being airbrush body-painted before strolling the precincts of a Fantasy Fest street fair in Key West. Very often, though, there is trouble in paradise, with things found going terribly awry on account of either environmental catastrophe, human incompetence, or a combination of the two. A cruise ship swimming pool is seen sloshing about in choppy waters; parasailers are blown off-course by an incoming storm; airplanes are disturbed by incoherent and insurgent passengers or witnessed in the process of crash landing protocol.”