Bruce Checefsky

My short films require extensive, almost obsessive research to uncover the facts and materials surrounding the original lost film. I carefully unravel a filmmaker’s life story. I am especially interested in their social and political, and economic conditions under which the lost film was originally made. Several of my films were made in the country of their origin, to influence the cultural and contextual grain which plays a decisive role in the films ability to move beyond a stick-figure view of history.

Whether an authentic reproduction or not, my films assert their own ideology. They are intended as an independent project, and exist in contrast to the original version. They are curatorial in process and creative in production. The remake film acquires new meaning by its intertextuality: each film is the product not simply of the original but of a relationship to other films and to the structures of film itself.

I take allegorical strategies to a new level. While employing ‘ready-made’ ideas and aesthetics, repeating in a way the works of others, I allow the films to retain their original meaning, their entire historical and aesthetic context. I reserve the ‘opportunity’ to create meaning through the second allegorical layer of the work. The fact that these artists’ films no longer exist or were never produced provides considerable room for creativity, and an immeasurable degree of responsibility.