Random Movies

On the subject of this film and its title, Pettena comments: “In March 1972, coming out of the studio of a local TV channel in Salt Lake City, after giving a live interview on a program broadcast in the morning, I saw some boxes that contained many small reels of 16 mm film that were being thrown away. I had the idea of putting my hands in and grabbing as many reels as possible, and that is what Idid. Then without checking their content, I joined the filmstrips together and showed them that evening (at the end of a public lecture on my work), presenting the whole thing as one of my films and seeing it myself for the first time.” They were out-of-date promotional films, many of them in two copies, commercial advertisements as well as electoral propaganda. So the screening proved particularly provocative for an audience that had come to attend a “cultured” lecture and found themselves, in an insistent manner, treated as an audience of “advertising skits.”