Willie And Brewsie

WILLIE AND BREWSIE presents itself almost as a puzzle: what is the relationship between the snatched, mordant, precarious images of discarded Americana (numbered doors, trash, roads and fields) and the text, printed as intertitles on a pink screen – and what is this text, exactly? A transcribed or imagined conversation between two average Americans, patriotic yet disenchanted, concerned yet spaced-out? In fact, it is a 1946 text by Gertrude Stein, but Madansky (superb music: Zeena Parkins) brings out its complete relevance to the Age of Trump, and the hallucinatory, brutal distortions created in ordinary, everyday lives. (Adrian Martin)