If George Orwell had been only slightly more prescient, the infamous “Two Minutes Hate” and assorted Newspeak indoctrinations in 1984 would have been delivered in the blue hues and bouncing slides of a PowerPoint presentation. This, anyway, is the idea behind Homage to George Orwell, a short PowerPoint movie by Brian Espel that will be screened this weekend at Chicago’s first-ever PowerPoint film festival.
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The festival is the brainchild of local filmmakers Hannah Maximova and Mike Hartigan, who met in an undergrad comedy troupe at the University of Arizona. The pair moved to Edgewater nine years ago, and recently finished their first feature-length film. They support themselves as freelance graphic designers in the advertising industry, and so far they’ve found the corporate world to be confining. “Everybody’s unhappy, everybody’s depressed,” says Maximova. “You see people dying on their way down.”
By bending and twisting their stories to make sense of esoteric yet generic images, the films call attention to the bizarre visual world that clip art creates. In The Story of Bob, Bill Walters builds an entire narrative about office racial strife around a single drawing of a white man in a suit and umpire gear standing between a black man and a white man, both dressed in suits and seemingly bent on pummeling each other. Says Maximova, “Because clip art is so purposefully bland and the images are supposed to correspond smoothly with such an incredible number of possible needs, it’s doubly entertaining to misuse them.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Marty Perez.
