The Young Man as a Movie Star (Distortions of Bully and Candy)
Film installation
The Young Man as a Movie Star (Distortions of Bully and Candy) is based on the young male character and his role in cinema. Using the well-known male directors Hitchcock, Godard, Spielberg and Von Trier – each iconic for a different period in film history – and personal recollections of Bart Groenendaal and his childhood in the eighties – a period in time when the concept of masculinity definitively shifted – different possible relationships between a 20-year-old man and 45-year-old woman are explored in this work.
The same two actors play a variation of the fictive characters Bully and Candy in each film. Both depict distorted liminal figures in cinema and act within the frameworks of perverted film clichés. They are constantly entangled in a different melodramatic plot, which reflects on the zeitgeist of the aforementioned film makers and incorporates their stylistic characteristics (the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s and 2000s). In Opulence, for example, Bully and Candy are a neurotic housewife in the fifties and a fugitive terrorist; in Paranoia two playful lovers; in Perversion a mother and her psychic son; and in Competition fellow performing artists who struggle with physical and moral problems.
