(link)
Leigh's is titillating surely, anxious, naughty, filled with all the nervous transgression of an arthouse "social experiment". Haha what if we took an anxious group psychology project but added a documentary panopticon. Of course the projects are interesting as they are well polished mirrors, psychology is turned into a formal exercise of cinema. And this thing is made for essay explicating all the formal structures that mirror its conflict. Watch "psychology" made into object of art, humans into a petri-dish, cross-sections of a people for microscope slides. "Arguably more anthropological than therapeutic..." The problematization method,* a sort of making-confounded. Greying the waters with the tangling of culture: people made demographics made signifiers, and forced to abut and spark. People are made to be art's object which gets conflated with analysand. Good cinema is not necessarily healthy outcome.
*Think Renzo Marten's Enjoy Poverty, Jordan Wolfson's Animation Masks, Korine's Spring Breakers.
(Watch the film through Ledare's website here.)
