[…] craving for narrative by Max Grau
There’s an article in The Hollywood Reporter about a 'Grease' Prequel 'Summer Loving' in the Works. It’s a prequel no one asked for, but I guess we will wait and see if it actually happens and how it turns out.
But ever since I read the news, I kept thinking of this video from 2015 by the artist Max Grau titled […] craving for narrative. It revolves around a 23 second scene from Grease, the first verse of the song “You’re the one that I want”.
The soundtrack and the scene is on a loop for 23 minutes and during that time, typed out text appears below the clip and other visuals are added too.
[…] craving for narrative is thoughtful and funny. It starts with text by the artist describing the film and his thoughts about it. But it soon turns into a reflection about nostalgia (“longing for times and places you just know from stories”), memory, pop culture, Internet culture and obsession.
In Max Grau’s words:
«[…] craving for narrative» is some kind of non-indexical essay film about temporality and the porosity of meaning. Using a desktop-like visual space, it is structured around a 23 second clip from the 1978 movie «Grease» starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.
This short clip becomes the starting point for a sprawling narration. It’s about making sense of obsessions and what it is, that makes nostalgia so appealing. About pop music as a dispositive structuring reality and about white Adidas high top sneaker. It’s about dancing and hyper-intensity. About loops, the presence, families and the question if there’s some kind of post-ideological media-usage these days. And I guess somehow, this film is also about the internet.