Boy/Analysis: An Abridgement of Melanie Klein's "Narrative of a Child Analysis"

Steve Reinke

2008 | 00:05:26 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | DV video

Collection: Single Titles

Tags: Animation, Sexuality, Youth/Childhood

"The content of the rogue computer animation Boy/Analysis is perfectly illustrated by the integral title, namely, a drastic abbreviation of Melanie Klein's 1961 key study on child psychology. The initial 93 sessions the psychoanalyst booked with a ten-year-old boy, are reduced down to 16 by Reinke, and thoroughly illuminated. Tumbling around, appearing and disappearing against a black background, are text fragments. A score from Benjamin Britten orchestrates this semantic ballet in which the most arbitrary associations can be made. Colour illustrations, a copy of a drawing of the child that was recorded as an appendix in Klein's book, and comparable naive sketches that Reinke received from artist Emily Vey Duke, follow as coda.

Seldom did Reinke--always working with archival material, found footage, or his own memories--go so far with his irony as to instill new life into dead material. The destabilising of the individual, one of his fixed points of interest, rises to the top here with an unsurreptitious lightness."
--Argos Centre for Art & Media Catalog




Prizes + Awards

Images Prize, Images Festival, Toronto 2009

Premiere

LUX28 Exhibition

Exhibitions + Festivals

Chicago Underground Film Festival, 2009

Migrating Forms Festival of Film and Video, 2009