Pop Ups Are The New Wave

Life, for Jean-Luc Godard's 'children of Marx and coca-cola,' was an extended meditation on politics, pop culture and the vicissitudes of dating. Peter Horvath adapts the concerns of this generation and the filmic style in which they were rendered in his new work of net cinema 'Tenderly Yours.' Here, the story of Josephine--a contemporary French woman who 'detests money/ thinks herself a marxist/ and thinks she is too old for her age'--unfolds in two simultaneous Quicktime videos. The central window illustrates her brief encounter with a like-minded young man while the smaller, peripheral frame provides ambient and intimate asides in the form of colorful abstractions and pixilated close-ups. Nodding both to the early writings found in the journal Cahiers du Cinema and Lev Manovich's more recent Soft Cinema, 'Tenderly Yours' exploits net conventions to emulate the spontaneous, fragmented and naturalistic mode of new wave filmmaking. The question is whether the quandaries of the children of Marx and coca-cola are relevant to the kids these days, or if perhaps the generation to which Josephine belongs should claim new lineage. - Lauren Cornell