ART HISTORY Spotlight

“Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper,” filmmaker Jean Cocteau once famously said. But what Cocteau didn’t anticipate was how unstable the lines between reality and fantasy can become when the cost of films becomes so small and the crews necessary to make them so minimal. This is especially fraught with potential danger when filmmakers use sex to explore their lives and the lives of their friends and collaborators. In the middle chapter of this trilogy, Joe Swanberg casts himself as Sam, a filmmaker who is directing his wife and his friend in an intensely erotic and sexually charged film As the emotional landscape of the fictional world begins to bleed over into reality, anger and frustration erupt.