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Big Boss and the Ecstasy of PressuresDescription
In conjunction with the Block Museum’s fall exhibition Geof Oppenheimer: Big Boss and the Ecstasy of Pressures, Chicago-based artist Geof Oppenheimer has programmed a series of four films. Each grapples with the slickness of capitalism: through paranoia and suspense (The Conversation), black comedy (The Boss of It All), social realism (La Promesse), and the psychology of mass culture (The Dark Knight). The Boss of It All satirizes our love-hate relationship with authority—something the characters crave and rail against in the same breath. The Conversation directs its unflinching gaze at the ambiguity of human communication in a world where life and death decisions must be made. In La Promesse, a fifteen-year-old’s emerging sense of morality comes up against the need for economic stability. In The Dark Knight, the Joker overturns the rules of law & order and organized crime, reveling in a destructive anarchy that is as essential as the aspects of modernity that shaped Bruce Wayne: industrialization, Freudian fears, and the urban metropolis. Together these films paint a picture of a world where order can only exist within a greater and more dangerous disorder—a world prone to misunderstanding, exploitation, destruction, misanthropy, and disturbing beauty. Join Oppenheimer and London-based film curator Will Schmenner in a discussion of the series at 7pm, followed by a screening of the art house satire The Boss of It All at 8pm on October 15.