Memory Lines

“If walls could talk” suddenly comes to fruition with faces talking to one another using appropriated lines of movie dialogue. This five-to-10-minute video, written, produced, shot and directed by local filmmaker Neil Kendricks, features two or more actors - male and female - reinterpreting the appropriated dialogue in a cut-up version, not unlike William S. Burroughs’ cut-up novels, where new writing merges with familiar lines from movies that we love and carry inside of us. Evoking our collective memories of shared cultural references, generated by our movie-going experiences, Memory Lines will penetrate our dreams.

The video-art project features UCSD theater students reinterpreting memorable lines of dialogue from classic and contemporary films. Each participant will be filmed in close-up with a static HD video camera recording the nuances of his or her face as the dialogue is spoken directly to the camera’s lens. The audition process offers a unique opportunity to gather a range of actors’ responses to the appropriated dialogue and multiple meanings evoked by introducing the words into a new context.

The accumulative result launches into a new, improvised narrative composed of fragments that will be edited as a split-screen, single-channel video piece. Imagine projected, emoting faces of actors resurrect and breathe new life into old-movie memories transformed using cutting-edge, digital technology in the shotgun marriage of today and yesteryear’s cinematic alchemy.

Memory Lines will be projected onto the torso of Tim Hawkinson’s massive Bear sculpture, one of the many site-specific artworks belonging to UCSD’s Stuart Collection.