VALUE-ADDED CINEMA
Steve Seid and Peter Conheim
USA 2003, 47 min.

Steve Seid, Video Curator for Pacific Film Archive and Peter Conheim of Negativland present a finely tuned montage of egregious product placement shots, drawing on 70 films—removing the gratuitous and unnecessary plots and leaving behind just the exhilarating core of consumerism.

Commercial cinema is becoming just that, a commercial—ninety minutes of seamless advertising, corralling all artistry within the comfy confines of the saleable. In years past, the propmaster, like Wile E. Coyote, had a pantry filled with generic products: Acme beer, Acme cereal, or Acme explosives. Later, product placement infiltrated the Dream Factory with an array of lovely goods and foodstuffs—sneaky salutations to the merchandised environment. Now Product Placements surface in forms more numerous than flavors at a Baskin-Robbins: insinuated into dialogue, thrown front and center like loss leaders, even engulfing entire features until they become little more than cross-promotions for toy manufacturers. That most forward-thinking of films, Minority Report, heightened the practice with its talking Armani billboards and customer-friendly Gap, raking in a cool twenty-five million in the process. Value-Added Cinema offers up the stuff dreams are made of.

—Chicago Underground Film Festival

In attendance: Steve Seid

WITH:

12 HOT WOMEN
Alan Chan, 2003, USA, 3 min
alan@12hotwomen.com

ICE CREAM
US Premiere
Iza, 2003, USA, 7 min
activeyogurtculture@earthlink.net

HARDCORE ACTION NEWS
Niels Alpert, 2003, USA, 21 min
nielsa@pacbell.net

AMERICAN RASH
Tom Borden, 2003, USA, 7 min
tom@wanderingeye.com

30 SECONDS OF HATE
Bryan Boyce, 2003, USA, 2 min
bb@dangeroussquid.com

COMBUSTABLE
World Premiere
Daniel McKinney, 2004, USA, 3 min
danielmckinney@yahoo.com