Dead Pigeon (single-screen version)

A dialectical comedy journeying through nationality, nationalism, language, communication, knowledge and the production of ‘meaning’.
Voices: Joseph Beuys, Buckminster Fuller, Adolf Hitler, Urs Kiefer, David Larcher, Will Milne, Benito Mussolini, Jasmine Nicholas, Andy Warhol. Performers: Flipot, George Saxon. Music: Terry Day, Max Eastley, Paul Jolly.
‘Richard Philpott’s show is hardly for those who think going to the flicks is all about ice cream and car chases. But anyone who prefers their cinema to delve a little deeper should find something of interest in this multi-media project which investigates the way our very desire to make sense out of things, itself produces meaning.’ – Time Out.
‘An assault on the senses is perhaps the best way of describing a ‘performance’ of Richard Philpott’s Dead Pigeon… The film itself is a concoction of found film junk, upside down home movies, newsreels, slides and advertisements. Intertitles including homilies, colourful passages of Rabelais and Eisenstein’s weighty theories contrast with a soundtrack that mixes regular music, birdsong, basic communication in foreign languages, and the voices of Warhol, Mussolini and Hitler among others…it’s confusing, sometimes stimulating and occasionally amusing – and quite an experience.’ – City Limits.
‘With a rigorously experimental work, Philpott makes in Dead Pigeon a deconstruction of the symbols and signs which dominate, species of confused memory, which remain in our recollections and in our sensibility like a register, experiences of communication but not always assimilated or ‘arranged’ logically. It is a question of a film’s being which is accepted or rejected en bloc. There is no half-way expression.
Philpott crosses images, undoes them, lays them over one another, creates a no-man’s-land for millions of memories, of associations, of vacuums, of leaps ahead. This vacillating world is always dominated by a battle of symbols, of fragmented communications where every definition is negated for a definition which is seen to follow.’ – A Capital. Lisbon, Portugal.