Chain
It’s a Mall, Mall World: Jem Cohen explores the faceless commercial landscapes we rarely see on the big screen by Jonathan Rosenbaum
“CHAIN, the first solo feature by film and video artist Jem Cohen, is a strange mix of documentary and fiction about malls and similar commercial spaces. It’s meditative rather than action packed, and the creepiness it exposes has as much to do with absence as presence … CHAIN was shot in 16-millimeter over six years in hundreds of malls around the world — Atlanta, Dallas, Orlando, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, Melbourne. That it’s impossible to tell the malls’ locations is part of the point. ‘I began the project,’ says Cohen in his press notes, ‘by deciding to focus on the corporate and commercial landscapes that I had previously ‘framed out’ in my filmmaking, and to try to understand how these places were affecting the people within them. Wal-Mart, for example, opens a new store roughly every two days and yet the actual sites of such developments often take on a strange invisibility. Their presence can begin to seem inevitable and even natural. Rather than examining this phenomenon through the facts, experts, and arguments of the traditional documentary, Chain tells the stories of two women as this environment shapes their lives…’
See also:
Chain Reaction: a review of Chain and interview with Jem Cohen by Tom Charity
Guardian Review: All the world’s a car park