In this way, Easton invents, or re-invents, her audience. We are all ‘movie-made
children’, even, perhaps, a generation moulded to the laws of the society of the
spectacle.10 Equally, “!” [Hollywood Blues] is a movie-made drama, impossible
without the spectacles of emergency invested by our screens. But we are also –
audience, performance – in a different place. Immersed, but differently, in the readymade fantasia that helps to support everyday reality, we are invited to imagine anew.
The space usually occupied by the image has been left empty: agitated, and there
among us, but empty. We have been lucky tonight.
Vicky Lebeau
Impeccably self-conscious and ironic, witty and
intelligent, easily exposing the absurdity of the
disaster movie genre while paying affectionate
homage. But to describe the piece as delightful is
not to deny its substance and many resonances.
It is riveting, high-intensity stuff.
Dany Louise, AN Interface
10
Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, London: Verso 1990, p.7: ‘[T]he spectacle’s
domination has succeeded in raising a whole generation moulded to its laws.’ The phrase ‘movie-
made children’ derives from Hugo Munsterberg’s pioneering studies of film in the early 1910s; see
Hugo Münsterberg on Film: The Photoplay: a Psychological Study and Other Writings, New York
and London: Routledge 2002.
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