COCKED, 2003
(from the ReVisionist Cinema series)
Color video w/audio on DVD for projection
or multi-channel monitor installation
Running time: 10:00

Produced during the peak of international debate regarding the United States’ initiative to invade Iraq, COCKED is an anti-war statement in the guise of a minimalist Western, borrowing dozens of short segments from several Cinema classics of the genre.

COCKED expands and sustains what is usually a brief, tense, cinematic moment--the showdown--and implodes the quintessential American mythology of the Western by denying the redemption of its protagonists through acts of violence. As this extended psychodrama plays out, the classic desert panorama characteristic of the Western’s cinematic space is collapsed into a metaphoric psychological space, where every gesture, glance and posture, communicate a mixture of aggression and fear, and nothing is resolved