Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen: May The Fox Take You
A film bringing together opposing notions – love and heartbreak, security and danger, pogo dance tutorials and military robot dogs. Through five interweaving vignettes, the work summons the energy of life against a haunting sense of harm which lies underneath.
A song of loss and transformation
May The Fox Take You is guided by a text assembled from idioms, curses and blessings loosely translated from a language that is almost extinct. The moving image work travels through a field of mustard, within the cavities and digestive fluids of carnivorous plants, to a moth that looks like twin snakes nodding in the wind. A robot dog is being kicked, a dancer is rehearsing a choreography taken from a pogo dance tutorial. The soundscape is composed of recorded drum beats which are electronically rearranged, overlaid with strings formed by machine learning models.
As filmmakers, Cohen and Van Balen work through intuition, creating a narrative-free work-of-art. The film follows seemingly unrelated scenes, cut with dissonant text and a unique energy: one that the imagery and texts contradicts itself as it confronts that mourning with violence. The confrontation of loss lingers throughout, something that has become universal in this post-pandemic life, as the residue of the collective trauma felt by loss of time, climate grief and anxiety persists.
