The Fig Leaf and the Furnace of the Novice Stars

THE STRUGGLE TO MAKE ONE’S ACTIVE LIFE SIGNIFICANT.  TO MAKE IT A WORK OF ART.

Influenced by Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Dusan Makajayev’s Sweet Movie, The Fig Leaf and the Furnace of the Novice Stars is an experimental film narrative mixing documentary footage, still photography and incongruous non-diegetic narration.

What at first appears to be a melodramatic love triangle between an obnoxious Wall Street trader, a beautiful and lonely neurosurgeon and a once ambitious Italian political science professor who now obsessively collects plants devolves into a treatise on the inability of the film medium to depict authentic life.

Each “film” character portrayed is incapable of showing intimacy and continues to fill their own personal void through new age yoga cults and sexual deviancy. Meanwhile the weight of the world revolutionary labor movement continues to beckon for the hacienda to be built.

The Fig Leaf and The Furnace of the Novice Stars is currently in Development.  This will be an experimental video project shot on location in and around Los Angeles, California.