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THIS DOESN’T SOUND LIKE IT HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH WHAT OUR STORE IS DOING: FILMS BY FRANK HEATH
2012-2021
Director
Frank Heath
Starring
Runtime
123 minutes
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The cogs of commerce crank along, gobbling all of life up into the machinery, and most of the time it just feels like the dull pain of going to work everyday. The films of Frank Heath are a bold new wrench thrust into the punishing gears. Applying a dry, clinical sense of humor towards the strange banality of late stage capitalism, Heath’s work spans styles from video collage to oblique observation to essay film to talking-head documentary. With THIS DOESN'T SOUND LIKE IT HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH WHAT OUR STORE IS DOING, the Beacon has assembled an evening of our favorites, highlighting Heath’s most illustrious mode—and the thing that made us fall in love with him—his prank phone calls.
Often taken for granted, the clerks, phone operators, manufacturers, technicians, transportation workers, and other minimum wage employees are the standing guards outside of the fortress of capital. They exist at the boundary between the “customer” and a complex web of social and economic relations. The interminable bog of business and state bureaucracy cannot be traversed but with the help of these fair workers. Heath’s telephonic interventions blow away the thin veil of logistical communications, unshrouding the mundanely-terrible or terribly-mundane core of our great nation. His greatest weapon? The infamously popular, mostly naive, endlessly joyous prank phone call. Not your average “Your refrigerator is running” type punch lines, Heath wields the prank phone call as an opportunity for history lessons, dream analysis, science fiction story-telling and para-political surrealism, forcing functionaries to answer questions beyond the scope of their duties into the realm of the impossible. And usually people agree that he still seems, at the end of the day, like a pretty normal guy.
FOR FANS OF: Jon Wilson, Nathan Fielder, Longmont Potion Castle, Cold War architecture, the mysticism of birds, Paolo Cirio’s formulation of ‘evidentiary realism,’ time capsules for the apocalypse, the art museum version of Punk’d
“From burial rites, to spy networks, to numerology and gene banks, Heath probes at what lies below the surface of our world and of ourselves. His films are at times portentous, at others hilarious and often a mix of both. A sense of synchronicity suffuses his work — a feeling that there’s no such thing as a wrong number.” - Spectacle
Featuring:
THE HOLLOW COIN (2016)
ON THE BEACH 01: MADE TO BE FOUND (2014)
INVASIVE SPECIES (2012)
ON THE BEACH 02: A PRIME CONDITION (2017)
THERE IS NOTHING UNDERNEATH THE WEST VIRGINIA WING (2018)
ON THE BEACH 03: MIDNIGHT SUN (2018)
WAR PIGEON (2017)
PROTECT YOUR HOME (2021)
ASYMPTOMATIC CARRIER (2013)
Often taken for granted, the clerks, phone operators, manufacturers, technicians, transportation workers, and other minimum wage employees are the standing guards outside of the fortress of capital. They exist at the boundary between the “customer” and a complex web of social and economic relations. The interminable bog of business and state bureaucracy cannot be traversed but with the help of these fair workers. Heath’s telephonic interventions blow away the thin veil of logistical communications, unshrouding the mundanely-terrible or terribly-mundane core of our great nation. His greatest weapon? The infamously popular, mostly naive, endlessly joyous prank phone call. Not your average “Your refrigerator is running” type punch lines, Heath wields the prank phone call as an opportunity for history lessons, dream analysis, science fiction story-telling and para-political surrealism, forcing functionaries to answer questions beyond the scope of their duties into the realm of the impossible. And usually people agree that he still seems, at the end of the day, like a pretty normal guy.
FOR FANS OF: Jon Wilson, Nathan Fielder, Longmont Potion Castle, Cold War architecture, the mysticism of birds, Paolo Cirio’s formulation of ‘evidentiary realism,’ time capsules for the apocalypse, the art museum version of Punk’d
“From burial rites, to spy networks, to numerology and gene banks, Heath probes at what lies below the surface of our world and of ourselves. His films are at times portentous, at others hilarious and often a mix of both. A sense of synchronicity suffuses his work — a feeling that there’s no such thing as a wrong number.” - Spectacle
Featuring:
THE HOLLOW COIN (2016)
ON THE BEACH 01: MADE TO BE FOUND (2014)
INVASIVE SPECIES (2012)
ON THE BEACH 02: A PRIME CONDITION (2017)
THERE IS NOTHING UNDERNEATH THE WEST VIRGINIA WING (2018)
ON THE BEACH 03: MIDNIGHT SUN (2018)
WAR PIGEON (2017)
PROTECT YOUR HOME (2021)
ASYMPTOMATIC CARRIER (2013)