Whatever make the car move
with Sam Kaufman, Joe Adam, Philippe Ciompi2024
Whatever Make the Car Move evolves around a redacted casting interview migrated from another film (Good Time, Ben & Josh Sadie) and evocation of the (male) spaces of delinquency.
An extended interview employs split-screen formatting and generative, AI image sources, to evoke a displaced life story and crime-making narrative voice.
Three primary, eclectic elements are materialised: the disclosures of a former prisoner recalling a destitute upbringing in New York and armed robberies; the historical collection of unidentified statues archive at the Warburg Institute, London; and a machine learning dataset combining these statues with the film’s protagonists - into figures of another order.
The twist in the film’s structure is in the inclusion of an interview gleaned from the auditioning process for another film. Whatever Make the Car Move redacts and appropriates this call-back interview, included along with images of other auditionees, without them ever quite arriving, or being present.
The film is a study in profiling and the dissonant mind. It explores male childhood, poverty and adolescence via a series of unidentified images, compound bodies and interview sections, and demonstrates redacted criminality as a vehicle for unintelligibility and its misadventures.