HEIST FILMS ENTERTAINMENT
MON [Oscar Niemeyer Museum]

 

Cinema does not merely present images; it envelops them in a world.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image.

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Heist Films Entertainment, in addition to being the title of this exhibition, is the name of a film production company created by Gustavo von Ha to develop and distribute trailers for films that will never be made. TokyoShow (The Search for Love), Gasoline (Hollywood in Flames), Gasoline 2 – Back to the Fire (Hollywood in Flames 2), and Paranormal (Demonic Girl) feature promotional materials, professional actors and actresses, websites and social media pages, DVDs distributed at pirate movie stands, and posters—in short, everything a real film is conventionally expected to have. However, they merely emulate a reality that is never fully realized.

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If, on the one hand, the production company does not provide the public with all the images that could compose a feature-length film, on the other, it opens the door to the world that each of these trailers suggests. The viewer is confronted with a series of images, narrative fragments, photographic tones, scenes, and characters that weave together the structure of each film’s universe.

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These universes have their own rules and establish independent temporalities that unfold beyond the moving images presented in the trailers. In this operation, the image surface is not opaque but translucent, providing a channel of communication between what is visible and what is imaginable. It is within this possible field—of what is yet to come—that the virtual worlds of each film develop. Through this crossing of images that creates temporalities, the real and the objective give way to the virtual and the subjective.

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In this exhibition, however, this channel of communication is activated in two directions: the real feeds the virtual and vice versa. The trailers are accompanied by props—used during filming or created afterward—along with stills and documents related to the production process. These are objects and images that gain material form from the virtual worlds established by the films.

This two-way exchange offers the public the possibility of constantly reworking the narratives and virtualities of the Heist Films Entertainment universe, placing into perspective the continuous possibility that cinema provides: the creation of worlds.

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Tomás Toledo
Curator