Cowboy Movie
16mm film, TRT: 00:31, 2022
Camera: Juan Carlos Alom
Produced by El Espacio 23/Fotografía en Movimiento, VIII Edición
The act of striking a match on a tooth is a familiar trope in Western films, serving as a cinematic shorthand to demonstrate a character's lone toughness, or nonchalance in the face of danger. Attempting to perform this trick in Cowboy Movie, Whitney Lynn fails repeatedly, opening the gesture to instead signal frustration and the artiface of bravado. Shot on expired Soviet film stock, the image is not controlled, but rather fragile and degraded.