28th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival

ji-hlavadok-revuecdfEmerging producersInspiration Forum
Machine Gun or Typewriter
Machine Gun or Typewriter
Machine Gun or Typewriter

Machine Gun or Typewriter

director: Travis Wilkerson
original title: Machine Gun or Typewriter
country: United States
year: 2015
running time: 71 min.

synopsis

A solitary man broadcasts a programme intended for a single listener on a pirate radio station. He is searching for his lost love, who disappeared without a trace. Images of the city, disappearing buildings and crumbling social structure all reflect his growing sense of loss. His anger intensifies; it threatens to explode. The ambient nature of the duel between recitation and static images crystallises into a radical exercise in meditation, in which intimacy decomposes into fundamental societal elements. A collage presenting the guilty conscience of one American and all of America charts the topography of memory of place and relationship. Wilkerson artfully blends fact with fiction, and intimate autobiographical details with ostentatious exaggeration in a genre he calls “punk-agit-noir”.

DETAIL:
I’m just sitting in the living room, watching the tv, trying to calm down… You walk out of the bedroom and you’re holding book I gave you… And you start to read: ‘Adapting a position in theory implies putting it into practice.’ ‘Fuck you,’ you say. And you slam the door and leave.

biography

Travis Wilkerson features as scriptwriter, composer and actor for his own documentaries, film essays and acted films. His work is greatly influenced by the Cuban film activist Santiago Alvarez. Wilkerson’s best-known works include the agitprop essay An Injury to One (2002), the acted film Who Killed Cock Robin? (2005), which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and his poetic portrait Accelerated Under-Development: In The Idiom Of Santiago Alvarez (1999), which was screened at the Jihlava IDFF in 2004.

more about film

director: Travis Wilkerson
cast: Travis Wilkerson
producer: Travis Wilkerson
script: Erin Wilkerson, Travis Wilkerson
photography: Travis Wilkerson, Erin Wilkerson
editing: Travis Wilkerson
music: Gangs, Travis Wilkerson
sound: Travis Wilkerson, Adva Wilkerson
Ministerstvo kultury
Fond kinematografie
Creative Europe Media
Město Jihlava
Kraj Vysočina
GEMO
Česká televize
Český rozhlas
Aktuálně.cz
Respekt
Dafilms