Right Now Then Wrong

Commissioned by the 2016 International Film Festival Rotterdam Critics Choice Program.

“The video is itself a work of art because of how it balances the writing of texts between sequences and regales philosophies below all of that. Just like the work to which it pays tribute, it’s a bit overwhelming and entirely deserving of multiple looks.” - Nick Newman, The Film Stage

“The film [Right Now Then Wrong] is really fascinating — it is basically the same story told twice, back to back, and the thing I really wanted to know is how the first version of the story compares to the second. If I took the same scene from both versions and played them at the same time, what could I find out? That was a wonderful exercise in critical viewing and side-by side analysis, but then I started to get a bit self-conscious: “Oh, maybe the audience doesn’t want to see this footage.” So, I thought maybe I can offer an alternative experience — if they don’t want to be spoiled, I can tell a story inspired by the film. This idea of having two video essays playing a the same time on different halves of the screen, the top and the bottom, and then at the beginning just instructing the audience that they can choose which one they want to see, they can simply use their hands to block the part of the screen they don’t want to see.

As the two video essays started playing, I saw some people blocking one half of the screen, some blocking the other half, others blocking it the way they are totally not supposed to, like vertically just having fun with it. But then the majority of the viewers, I think, tried to watch everything which is very revealing about human nature. I could literally see people’s eyeballs moving in all these different directions — if there was an eye-tracking technology, it would have been a mêlée. It made visible to me the diversity of movie-viewing experiences happening simultaneously in the theater. I really wish I had been filming, from my point of view, on the stage, with all these heads moving around in different directions. That, again, I really think embodies the idea of Critic Choice — bringing this liveness to the cinematic, theatrical experience that no other viewing context can quite match. For me, it was very much a fulfillment of what Critics’ Choice could realize.

- Interviewed by Yoana Pavlova in Vague Visages, March 26 2019.