V.O.

v.o. syncopates audio outtakes from European auteur films, subtitled in English, with music tracks and visual excerpts from classic gay porn of the 70ies and early 80ies. Notwithstanding the end credit source list, the clips might be gleaned from some akashic sphere unsubject to distinctions of modernist and minor cinemas, where Buñuel, de Oliveira, and Raul Ruíz consort freely with L.A. Tool & Die or Nights in Black Leather. Jones adopts some of his CalArts colleague Thom Andersen's method from Los Angeles Plays Itself, of deploying fictional film clips for their evidential value, refocusing viewers' attention to the built or natural urban environments preserved in the backdrops of countless commercial movies as material data of bygone social worlds and political eras. The vintage clips comprising v.o. brim with documentary detail, like a curlicued billboard for Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell's psychedelic gangland orgy Performance. (Ioannis Mookas)