This and That, and other minor misunderstandings
DV video, 12:30 min, stereo, 2001
Director, camera, editor, sound design
Funded in part by The Rockefeller Foundation
This and That is a road movie about forgetting…and being forgotten.
Shot over a period of six years while traveling through France, Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, and Puerto Rico; it is a document of failed loves, death and how neither vengeance nor pardon can modify the past.
Premiered:
Museum of Modern Art, New York; April 2002
Dallas Video Festival; screening, May 2002
Broadcast Premiere
Reel New York, WNET TV, PBS Summer 2002
"I remember that I have remembered the same thing an untold number of times already." — JL Borges
Premiere at the Museum of Modern Art, New York 2002
Broadcast Premiere: Reel New York, WNET TV,PBS 2002
Mill Valley Film Festival, California 2002
Louisville Film and Video festival, Kentucky 2002
10e Biennale del'Image en Mouvement, Geneve, Switzerland 2003
Argos Festival, Brussels, Belgium 2003 Vancouver International Film Festival 2003
This and That is a road movie about forgetting…and being forgotten.
Shot over a period of six years while traveling through France, Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, and Puerto Rico; it is a document of failed loves, death and how neither vengeance nor pardon can modify the past.
In this video, Vélez continues his development and exploration of a multi layered visual language which he began with his video portrait of composer Brian Eno in 1984 and which he has refined and expanded using the new digital tools.
…this exquisitely shot, multi-layered journey though the labyrinthine corridors of memory and forgetting by New York based, Puerto Rican born pioneer video artist Edin Vélez is nothing short of dazzling. Poetic, meditative, and structurally evocative of the rhythms and pacing of World Music..the film chronicles the invisible narrator's six year journey across countries, continents, and emotional places…
The result…allows the conventional first person narrative voice to all but disappear into the folds of its Ultra baroque fabric. Richly textured as a visual collage of still and moving images, electronic effects, aural and visual metaphors, graphic manipulations of the written word, and a multiplicity of global cultural signifiers.
This and That…will long remain as an aesthetic milestone in the postmodern articulation of a globally savvy diasporic identity in the making.
Elena Feder, Nations, Pollinations, Dislocations: Changing Imaginary Borders in the Americas. Exhibition catalog Brussels, 2003
Credits: Edin Vélez: Producer, Director, Camera, Editor, Sound Design
Music; Excerpts from: Jarboe, The Beatles, Leonard Cohen, Nine Inch Nails. Marrero
